THE 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 



OF 



JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE 




Class __£l_4AJi__ 

Book ^ iSlilf 

Goipight}^^ 



COPmiGHT DEPOSIT. 



SIX HUNDRED COPIES OF THIS 
BOOK HAVE BEEN PRINTED — FOR 
PRIVATE DISTRIBUTION ONLY. 



THIS COPY IS NUMBER 



U-0 



f- 



PRINTED BY 

THE SCRIBNER PRESS 

NEW YORK 



THE BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 

OF 

JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE 



THE 

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 

OF 

JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE 




NEW YORK 

PRIVATELY PRINTED 

1917 



1 ^- 



CfStf 



Copyright, 191 7, by 
Caroline Sterling Choate 



m -i )i)i8 



©CI.A4 92I2 9 



*>, 



'-£> \ 



PREFATORY NOTE 

For many years Mr. Choate's family and friends 
had begged him to write his reminiscences. He in- 
variably refused to entertain the idea on the ground 
that, in his opinion, such sketches could be of no value 
to any one. To the many requests of publishers, 
editors, and biographers, he likewise — with a char- 
acteristic lack of vanity — turned a deaf ear. 

In the spring of 1914, however — when he was in 
his eighty-third year — the convalescence and inac- 
tion consequent upon the first severe illness of his life, 
prompted him to begin the dictation of these papers. 
They were casually and intermittently composed, 
with no idea of publication in mind, and only in- 
tended for the eyes of his immediate family. On 
occasions weeks and even months passed by without 
his giving them a thought. 

The papers are here printed literally, just as he dic- 
tated them to his secretary. Mr. Choate made no use 
of notes in preparing them; he consulted no books, 
and he never even corrected the manuscript. Had he 
done so, he would undoubtedly have made many ver- 
bal alterations — and perhaps excisions — in the text. 
He began the sketches with slight interest, but, as 

[v] 



[vi] 

they developed, he became more absorbed in the task 
and looked forward with a good deal of pleasure to 
going on with it. 

After the celebrations incident to his eighty-fifth 
birthday, he went back to the work with renewed 
zest and had started on the chapter entitled "Mar- 
riage*' when there came the break in our diplomatic 
relations with Germany. From that moment — Feb- 
ruary 3, 1917 — nothing could induce him to con- 
tinue his task. His mind seemed to harbor but one 
thought, the thought of the Great Cause and of the 
part which he longed to have his country play in it. 

Caroline Sterling Choate. 

Naumkeag, Stockbridge, Mass., 
October 16, 1917. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Prefatory Note v 

I. Ancient History 3 

II. Hog Island 20 

III. Childhood 33 

IV. Salem 44 

V, Harvard College 66 

VI. Training for the Bar 91 

VII. Early Days in New York 106 

VIII. At the New York Bar 128 

IX. Marriage 150 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Joseph Hodges Choate at the Age of Seventeen 

Frontispiece 
The original daguerreotype is in the possession of Mrs. 
Choate, and is the earliest existing picture of Mr. Choate. 



FACING PAGE 



The Old Witch House, Salem, in 1839 .... 10 

As it looked when it fascinated Mr. Choate as a boy. 
This house belonged to Lieutenant Nathaniell Ingersalls in 
1692; and it was here that the men and women under the 
terrible suspicion of witchcraft were examined. 

The Choate Bridge — Ipswich, Massachusetts . . 10 /^ 

Built in 1764 by Colonel John Choate, grandson of the first 
Choate settler, and brother of J. H. C.'s ancestor. This was the 
first bridge built on arches in that part of the world, and caused 
such wonder to the inhabitants that they waited all day when 
the supports were removed, expecting to see it collapse. 

Hog Island 20 /" 

Named from the shape of the land. The land was acquired 
by John Choate the original emigrant. In 1690 his son, 
Thomas, married and lived there for thirty-five years. 

Choate Homestead on Hog Island 20 j/^ 

Built in 1725 by Francis Choate, great-great-grandfather 
of J. H. C. Here, in 1799, Rufus Choate was born. The house 
and farm are still in the possession of his branch of the family. 

Stephen Choate — 1 727-1815 26 , 

Great-grandfather of J. H. C. He held various public offices, 
was twice married, had thirteen children, and lived to be 
eighty-eight years old. 

/ 

Doctor George Choate 34*^ 

Born at Ipswich, 1796; died at Cambridge, 1880, in the 
eighty-fourth year of his age — father of J. H. C. This silhou- 
ette was evidently made as he approached middle age. 
fix] 



[X] 



FACING PAGE 



House of Doctor George Choate on Essex Street, 

Salem 42 ^' 

This house was given to Mrs. George Choate by her father, 
Gamaliel Hodges, on the occasion of her marriage to Doctor 
Choate, and here all her six children were born. It was also 
in this house that Count Rumford served as apprentice to Mr. 
Appleton before the Revolutionary War. 

Hodges House on Essex Street, Salem .... 42 v 

A good specimen of the style of the period. Owned by John 
Hodges, uncle of J. H. C. 

Gamaliel Hodges — 1766-1850 54 

Grandfather of J. H. C. From a pastel portrait painted 
in Antwerp, when " Captain " Hodges, as a young sea captain, 
roamed the sea. He lived to be over eighty-four years old, and 
only survived his wife two months. Their married life lacked 
but six days of lasting sixty-two years. 

Doctor George Choate — 1 796-1 880 66 

Father of J. H. C. This portrait was made when he was 
about sixty-six years old. 

Mrs. George Choate 78 

Born at Salem, 1805; died at Stockbridge, 1887. Mother 
of J. H. C. Margaret Manning Hodges, daughter of Gamaliel 
and Sarah Williams Hodges, married Doctor Choate in 1825. 
Their married life lasted fifty-six years and a half, and they 
had four sons and two daughters. J. H. C. was the fifth child. 

Joseph Hodges Choate at the Age of Twenty . . 90 

This picture was taken with his class at graduation in 1852. 
The original daguerreotype is in the Harvard Library at Cam- 
bridge. 

RuFus Choate 98 

Born at Hog Island 1799; died at Halifax 1859. First cousin 
of Doctor George Choate. This was J. H. C.'s favorite por- 
trait of his distinguished kinsman, and always hung in his own 
room over his bed. He had a great admiration and affection 
for Rufus Choate, and always felt deeply grateful to him for 
his early kindnesses. 



[xi] 



FACING PACK 1/^ 

William M. Evarts io8 

The famous New York lawyer, Attorney-General, Secretary 
of State, and United States Senator. He invited J. H. C. to 
become junior partner in the firm of Evarts and Southmayd 
in 1859, and the relationship then begun was only dissolved 
by Mr. Evarts's death. This portait, painted by William M. 
Hunt in the seventies, shows Mr. Evarts in the prime of life. 

Gamaliel Hodges — 1766-1850 120 

This silhouette of Mr. Choate's grandfather was made when 
he was about seventy years of age. He was a very big man, 
over six feet and a half tall, and weighed over three hundred 
pounds; although when he was born he is said to have been 
so small that he was put in a silver tankard and the top shut 
down ! 

Joseph Hodges Choate \ x-xz /^ 

Caroline Sterling Choate J -^ 

These photographs were taken in 1863 — two years after their 
marriage, October 16, 1861. Their married life lasted over 
fifty-five years. 



^ 



Announcement of the Formation of the Firm of 

Choate and Barnes, in 1858 144 

This notice was found among Mr. Choate's papers, and 
must have been issued just a few months before he joined the 
firm of Evarts and Southmayd. 

■y 
Facsimile of Manuscript of Verses 152 

Written to Mrs. John Jay by Mr. Choate on the day of his 
engagement — ^July 4, 1861. The verses — printed, in toto, on 
pages 151 and 152 — are interesting as showing his character- 
istic handwriting, which never faltered until the day of his 
death. 



THE BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 

OF 

JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE 



ANCIENT HISTORY 

A long confinement to my room and bed, for the 
first time in more than eighty years, threw me in 
upon myself for many weary days and nights, and 
left me nothing to study but the pictures on the walls 
of my room; but these served as stepping-stones, as it 
were, in the progress of a long and happy life, and re- 
minded me of the many requests of my children and 
others that I would put upon paper some of its remi- 
niscences. 

I believe it was Doctor Holmes who said that a 
child's education should begin a hundred years be- 
fore he was born, and I think mine began at about 
the period he indicates. 

To begin with, there is the portrait of my sturdy 
maternal grandfather, Gamaliel Hodges — Captain 
Mill Hodges, as he was always called in Salem, where 
he was born and lived, and where he died in 1850. 
It is only a silhouette, but represents a sturdy and 
fine old figure at seventy, full of life and health, and 
good for many years to come. 

It was he who brought into our line the size and 
strength and length of days that has stood us so well 
in hand for three generations at least. It was his 
twenty-five years before the mast and on the quarter- 

[3] 



[4] 

deck full of fresh air and salt water, that gave us our 
good constitutions; and if I was able to maintain a 
very strenuous life at the bar for forty years and at 
the same time to give to public service all the atten- 
tion that a private citizen should, I owe it more to 
him than to anybody else. 

If he had had a full education he would undoubt- 
edly have been a very prominent character in Massa- 
chusetts, but he never went beyond the common 
schools at Salem, which at that date must have been 
of an extremely primitive character. He told me 
that in 1776, at the age of ten, he heard the Decla- 
ration of Independence read on Salem Common, and 
it made a life-long impression upon him; but what 
showed the limited quantity of his education was 
that he never went beyond the three R's-Reading, 
Writing, and Arithmetic— at the school that he at- 
tended, and that every day, when the hour came for 
dismissing school, the boys all rose and recited to- 
gether, ''Honorificabilitudinitatibus," and with the 
-bus'' all started for the door with a shout. 

That was the sum of all his schooling; for, like all 
Salem boys of well-to-do families in those days he 
took to the sea at fifteen, which served him as college 
and university through all the grades, as cabin-boy 
seaman, supercargo, second mate, first mate, and 
captain, and only retired when he had become not 
only the master but owner of his ship. The largest 
ships of that day were of six or seven hundred tons, 
which could easily get into Salem Harbor, and per- 



[5] 

mitted it to be the chief seaport of Massachusetts. 
And when larger vessels came in, that could not get 
in there, commerce moved to Boston and New York, 
with their commodious harbors. 

I never knew where this unpronounceable word 
that gave the sign for the dismissal of this school came 
from until some years afterwards, when I found it 
in the mouth of Holofernes, the schoolmaster in 
"Love's Labor's Lost," who seemed to have made a 
similar use of it. Now my grandfather, I am sure, 
had never read Shakespeare, and I doubt whether his 
teacher had. It must have been a word — if we can 
call it a word— that came down through tradition in 
the schools, handed from mouth to mouth, and cross- 
ing the Atlantic with the first settlers. And I have 
no doubt that for centuries before that it had been 
used in a similar way in the Latin schools of early cen- 
turies, for I find that it occurs in manuscripts at least 
as early as the twelfth century, in the "Catholicon" 
of Johannes of Janua, 1286, and in Dante's "De vul- 
gari eloquio," and in late middle Latin dictionaries. 
The idea seems to have been that any boy who could 
spell that could spell any word in any language. 

At any rate, Gamaliel Hodges' stalwart form has 
served us well ever since. He is said to have been the 
tallest man in Salem, and at his best, or worst, 
weighed no less than three hundred and fifty pounds. 
And his brothers were of like stature, for the story is 
told that when all three — he and Benjamin and 
George — were standing together on Derby Wharf, the 



[6] 

master of a foreign vessel coming up the dock, ex- 
claimed: "Is this a land of giants?" He had no 
nerves whatever, and is believed to have gone through 
his long life of eighty-five years without any illness 
until that which finally carried him off. 

But the Choates of our line were generally a ner- 
vous race, full of vitality and mental action, without 
the Hodges stamina, dying or failing early, and per- 
haps lingering into old age in a somewhat weakened 
condition. It was this blend of two such different 
stocks by the union of my father and mother that 
proved such a happy one for their posterity. 

There is another portrait of Gamaliel Hodges in my 
library, representing him as a spruce young American 
shipmaster, about twenty-five years old, in what ap- 
pears to have been the sort of uniform for such com- 
manders at that period. It was painted in Antwerp 
when he was there in command of a ship, and his 
cocked hat, red waistcoat, ruffled shirt, with a spy- 
glass under his arm, set him off to advantage. Strange 
to say, it bears a striking resemblance to one of his 
great-grandsons, showing how features are some- 
times transmitted to distant posterity to one out of 
many descendants. 

There is a story worth noting about this picture. 
My lifelong friend, Captain John S. Barnes, who was 
a naval commander in the Civil War, came into my 
library one day, and as his eyes fastened upon this 
picture he exclaimed, with uplifted eyes and hands: 
"Where did you get that picture.?" 



[7] 

Well, I told him I had seen it at least seventy years 
ago in my grandfather's house in Salem, and it came 
direct to me from there when that house was broken 
up. "Why," he said, "that cannot be. That is a 
portrait of John Paul Jones." 

It seems that Captain Barnes had purchased in 
Paris a portrait of John Paul Jones, at a high cost, 
and which he had treasured very carefully ever since 
out of admiration for that hero, and he said I must be 
mistaken about the subject of the portrait. Nothing 
would satisfy him, however, but to bring his own pic- 
ture and set it side by side with mine. And then it 
appeared plainly enough that the only resemblance 
between the two was in the cocked hat, the red waist- 
coat, the ruffled shirt, the spy-glass under the arm, 
and a similar air of the sea in both pictures — a ship 
and the salt water being in the background. 

I have heard that in those days it was the fashion 
with young American shipmasters, when in foreign 
ports, to get their portraits painted to bring home to 
their families, and very likely these two fell into the 
hands of the same artist. So he kept his portrait, and 
I mine, both perfectly satisfied with our treasures. 

My grandmother, Sarah Williams, who married 
Gamaliel Hodges in 1788, was a model of the do- 
mestic virtues. She had eight children, five sons and 
three daughters, of whom my mother, Margaret 
Manning Hodges, born in 1805, was the youngest. 

She was of tiny stature, much less than half the 
size of her husband, which saved her children and 



[8] 

grandchildren from becoming giants by reducing them 
to reasonable stature. Always serene, placid, and in- 
dustrious, she lived and thought in the good old style, 
as if the object of her life was accomplished by taking 
good care of her husband and children, and she satis- 
fied the old adage that the best women in the world 
are those of whom the world hears least. 

She lived to a good old age, being one year younger 
than her husband and dying three months before 
him, at the age of eighty-three. But before the end 
she got tired of life, and for many years I remember 
her sitting in the chimney-corner and occasionally 
exclaiming: "The Lord has forgotten me. The Lord 
has forgotten me." Her husband, with whom she had 
lived in happy union for sixty-two years, could not 
bear to live without her, and followed her to the grave 
in less than three months. 

It is through her that we trace our direct descent 
from the most distinguished of all our ancestors on 
either side, Philip English, the first great merchant of 
Salem and presumably of New England. He intro- 
duced into our lineage the only strain of foreign blood 
that I can find on either side. 

He was born in the Island of Jersey and his real 
name was Phillippe L'Anglais. He was baptized June 
30th, 165 1, in Trinity Parish, Isle of Jersey, where, on 
a visit to that island in 1902, I verified the record of 
his birth. He is said to have been of Huguenot 
blood, and came to Salem about 1670, where he soon 
after married Mary Hollingworth, daughter of Wil- 



[9] 

Ham Hollingworth by his wife, who is described as 
**the accompHshed and beautiful Eleanor Story." 

As I have traced my grandmother's descent from 
him, it was thus: 

Philip English's daughter Mary married Captain 
WiUiam Brown before 1730. Their son, William 
Brown, married Abigail Archer, widow of John El- 
kins of Salem. Their daughter, Abigail, married Cap- 
tain William Williams, an English master mariner, 
and their daughter, Sarah Williams, born in March, 
1767, was my grandmother. 

Strangely enough, two generations before, another 
Gamaliel Hodges, my grandfather's grandfather, had 
married another Sarah Williams, through whom we 
were connected with many interesting Salem fam- 
ilies. 

Philip English, after his settlement in Salem and 
marriage with Miss Hollingworth, proved to be its 
most enterprising and successful citizen. He built 
and owned twenty-seven vessels and carried on a great 
commercial trade, acquired large tracts of land, some 
of them through his wife, and built at the foot of 
Essex Street, overlooking the harbor across to the 
Beverly shore and the Marblehead shore, a fine old 
gabled house of large dimensions for that day, be- 
sides fourteen other valuable houses, and seems to 
have been universally respected and honored. 

But "the whirligig of time," as Shakespeare says, 
"brings in its revenges," and when the strange witch- 
craft delusion broke out in 1692 his eminence and 



[lO] 

great success brought upon him and his wife, prob- 
ably because of envy at their success and high char- 
acter — they were considered as too aristocratic — the 
charge of being guilty of witchcraft. 

They were both arrested and lodged in Boston jail, 
from which they managed to escape and took refuge 
in New York City, which has always been the asylum 
of the oppressed, where they remained until the de- 
lusion had subsided. Otherwise their names would 
certainly have been included with the other twenty 
victims of that terrible delusion. 

After their return he was for many years an appli- 
cant to the General Court of Massachusetts for relief 
and compensation for the injuries that he had sus- 
tained by reason of the wicked charge. 

But so rapidly did the delusion die out when the 
awful bubble had once burst, that on their return, in 
the following year, they are said to have been wel- 
comed home with bonfires and other marks of re- 
joicing, and he lived for thirty or forty years longer. 

The warrant for the arrest of English is dated at 
Salem, April 30th, 1692. It is directed to the mar- 
shal of the County of Essex and requires him "in 
their Majesties' names to apprehend and bring before 
us Phillip English of Salem, merchant, at the house of 
Lt. Nathaniell Ingersalls in Salem Village [that is the 
** Witch House" that is still standing] in order to 
theire Examination Relateing to high Suspition of 
Sundry acts of witchcraft donne or Committed by 
them upon ye Bodys of Mary Walcot Marcy Lewis 



THE OLD WITCH HOUSE, SALEM, IN 1839. 

As it looked when it fascinated Mr. Choate in boyhood. This house belonged to Lieu- 
tenant Nathaniell Ingersalls in 1692; and it was here that the men and women 
under the terrible suspicion of witchcraft were examined. 



THE CHOATE BRIDGE— IPSWICH, MASSACHUSETTS. 

Built in 1764 by Colonel John Choate, grandson of the first Choate settler, 
and brother of J. H. C.'s ancestor. This was the first bridge built on arches in 
that part of the world, and caused such wonder to the inhabitants that they 
waited all day when the supports were removed, expecting to see it collapse. 



would 
T twenty 



.QtSi MI.MajAa ,38tJOH HOTIV/ QJO 3I1T 

-usi J oJ bssnolsd aauod girfT .faoorfxo'i "' sJfiodO ■^lA baJaahiEl li nsrfw bs^Iool Ji aA 
namo'// bn£ nam sAj Jsrij aisri 86'w ji bnE ;lv^! 'i tHjiiognl Ibii.'firfjfiVI u.i.nv 



" i .«'lT38'JHOAeSAM .H31V/a4I— 300151 a 3TA0ID aHT 

,^sbl33 sJEorfO Jaift arij lo noabneia ,3Jcori3 nriol. biioloJ yd |>d^l ni jliuS 
ni z^Aois no jliud agbbd laift arfj acv? aiHT .lOJasane s'.O .H .[ to larfjoid bns 
{sdi 3&A3 sjnEjidErini sdj oJ isbnow rfooe baaus^ Lne ,bhow sHj ^o iisq Jsrij 

.saqclloo li 993 oj gnir •>''■"■ '•,■• -".i .-.«.■ '^oqqos sdl nail/; <{*b iifi balicw 



[II] 

Abigail Williams Ann Putnam and Elizabeth Hub- 
bert and Susannah Sheldon: viz: upon some or all of 
them belonging to Salem village or farmes whereby 
great hurt and dammage hath benne donne to ye 
Bodys of said persons according to complaint of Capt 
Jonathan Walcot and Serjent Thomas Putnam in be- 
half of their Majesties for themselves and also for 
severall of theire neighbours." 

On the 2d of May, George Herrick, marshal 
of Essex, reports Philip English cannot be found, 
whereupon a new warrant was issued to the marshal- 
general or his lawful deputy, and restating that he 
cannot be found, the marshal is authorized to appre- 
hend him and convey him into Salem and deliver him 
into the custody of the Essex marshal. And the 
marshal-general's deputy reports that **In obedience 
to the within written warrant the within remanded 
Phillip English was arrested and committed by the 
Marshall General to the Marshall of Essex, on the 
30th of May instant." But nevertheless he and his 
wife did escape. 

And this is some of the evidence which is worth re- 
lating as showing the horrible character of that de- 
lusion: 

*'The complaint of Susanna Sheldon against Phillip 
English, the said Susanna Sheldon bieng at meeting 
on the Sabboth day being the 24 of Aprill shee being 
aflicted in a very sad manner she saw phillip English 
step ouer his pew and pinched her and a womane 
which came from boston wich saith her name is good 



[12] 

ne when shee were coming home against William 
Shaws house their mether Phillip English and a black 
man with a hy crowned hatt on his head and a book 
in his hand houlding the book to her and Phillip eng- 
lish told her that Black man were her God and if 
shee would tuch that boock he would not pinch her 
no more nor no body els should. 

"on the next day phillip English came again and 
pinched her and told her that if shee would not 
toutch the book hee would kill her. 

"On the second day at night apeared to her two 
women and a man and brought their books and bid 
her touct them shee told them shee would not shee 
did not know wher they lined on of them told her 
they lived at the village and heald the book to her 
again and bid her touch it. shee told her shee did 
not know their names on of them told her shee was 
old Goodman buck lyes wife and the other woman 
was her daughter Mary and bid her touch the book, 
shee told no shee had not told her how long shee had 
beene a witch, then shee told her shee had beene a 
witch ten years and then shee opened her brest and 
the black man gau her two little things like yong 
cats and she pit them to her brest and suckled them 
they had no hair on them and had ears like a man." 

The whole New England community appears to 
have gone mad and to have committed at the in- 
stigation of a handful of malicious and foolish girls a 
terrible massacre of twenty of their fellow citizens, 
among them some of the most cultivated, pious, and 



[13] 

innocent people in the world. Giles Corey, a man 
over eighty years old, was pressed to death by order 
of the court for refusing to plead to the indictment 
against him. And all this was done at the instiga- 
tion of the clergy of New England, headed by Cotton 
Mather, obsessed with the conviction that the Devil 
was among them laboring in person to corrupt and 
destroy the State. 

Certainly, my ancestor was extremely fortunate to 
escape with his life. I read that, not finding his per- 
son, they seized upon and confiscated 1,500 pounds' 
worth of his goods, and after many years he recovered 
judgment against the marshal for 60 pounds and 
was awarded 200 pounds by the commonwealth for 
his indemnity, a very sorry satisfaction for all his 
suffering. 

Choate seems to have been a very old English name 
among the better sort of English yeomen. I had the 
pleasure of meeting Lord Acton, a great historical 
authority, soon after my arrival in England for a long 
residence, and he said to me: 

*'Why, I have seen your name spelled exactly as 
it is now, in English annals as early as the fourteenth 
century." 

Foolishly enough, I did not think to ask him for a 
reference to the book where this could be found, and 
very soon afterwards he died, and the knowledge of 
that died with him. 

The name, however, did to a slight extent emerge 



[H] 

from obscurity in England early in the seventeenth 
century, when Thomas Choate, son of Thomas of 
Essex entered Christ College at Cambridge Univer- 
sity in the same year with John Milton, 1624. The 
records also show that he remained there for four 
years and took his degree with Milton in 1629, and 
being in the class for four years, they must often have 
met, and, at least, have become famihar acquain- 
tances. 

In the Biographical Register of Christ's College, 
issued in 1913, this entry appears: 

''Choate, Thomas: son of Thomas. Of Essex 
School: Wethersfield, under Mr. Cosen. 

Admitted pensioner under Mr. Cell — 
November 1624 B.A. 1629. 

Probably brother of John Chote or 
Choate, who went to America and be- 
came ancestor of Joseph Hodges Choate, 
United States Ambassador to England, 
I 899-1905." 

Pensioners at that date represented the sons of 
well-to-do people like Milton, whose father at that 
time was a scrivener and stationer in London. 

I have not been able to verify this identification of 
Thomas as the brother of my ancestor John, but there 
are many things that tend to confirm it, among these 
that John named his third son Thomas, and in the 
settlement of his estate, provision was made for the 



[15] 

completion of the education of his youngest son, Ben- 
jamin, at Harvard. The family tradition has al- 
ways been that our immigrant ancestor was the John 
Choate who was baptized by that name in the old 
church at Groton, in England, on the 6th of June, 
1624. I verified this record in the parish church, the 
same church in which Adam Winthrop, father of John 
Winthrop, was buried. 

Professor Masson, in his elaborate history of Mil- 
ton, which is really for the period covered by it a his- 
tory of England, records that Milton was one of 
forty-three students who commenced their academic 
course at Christ's College in the year 1624. 

"It will be noted that eight of the students in the 
above list entered as * lesser pensioners,' among whom 
were Milton, Pory and Choate, four as * sizars,' and 
but one as a 'greater pensioner.' The distinction was 
one of rank. All the three grades paid for their board 
and education, and in this respect were distinct from 
the 'scholars' properly so called, who belonged to the 
foundation. But the 'greater pensioners' or 'fellow- 
commoners' paid most. They were usually the sons 
of wealthy families; and they had the privilege of 
dining at the upper table in the common hall along 
with the Fellows. The 'sizars,' on the other hand, 
were poorer students; they paid least; and, though 
receiving the same education as the others, they had 
a lower rank and inferior accommodation. Inter- 
mediate between the greater pensioners and the siz- 
ars were the 'lesser pensioners'; and it was to this 



[.6] 

class that the bulk of the students in all the Colleges 
at Cambridge belonged. Milton, as the son of a 
London scrivener in good circumstances, took his 
natural place in becoming a 'lesser pensioner.' His 
school-fellow, Robert Pory, who entered the College 
in the same year and month, and chose the same 
tutor, entered in the same rank. Milton's father and 
Pory's father must have made up their minds, in 
sending their sons to Cambridge, to pay about £50 a 
year each, in the money of that day which was 
equivalent to about £180 or £200 a year now" (that 
is, in 1 881), and we must conclude that Thomas 
Choate's father did the same. 

To have been in the same little college with John 
Milton continuously for four years must have insured 
to him a liberal education. 

I have no doubt of the substantial accuracy of the 
statement that there was a near relationship between 
Thomas of Christ's and our ancestor John Choate, 
and we may believe that the family at that date was 
in fairly good circumstances. 

John Choate, from whom all the people of the name 
in America, now found in great numbers in all the 
States of the Union, are descended, appears to have 
arrived in Ipswich from the old country in or about 
the year 1643. The earliest mention of him in the 
records is in 1648, when he appears in a list of one 
hundred and sixty-one persons who subscribed to a 
fund to pay Major Daniel Dennison for giving mili- 
tary instruction. There is a tradition that he came 



[>7] 

from Sudbury, in England, which is on the border of 
Suffolk and Essex, but by what vessel he came or for 
what reason is wholly unknown. 

Like most of the other immigrants of that time, 
who were in moderate circumstances, he absolutely 
lost all connection with the relatives whom he had left 
behind him. There were no mails, no newspapers, 
no regular communication between the mother coun- 
try and the colonies. Now and then at rare intervals 
a vessel from the old country arrived, but it was very 
easy to lose all association with or knowledge of the 
relatives and friends they had left behind them. 

That he was of good courage and character is mani- 
fest from the progress that he made after his arrival 
in Ipswich. That he went diligently to work and 
made rapid progress in acquiring property and social 
connections is clear. In 1660 he married, but as the 
first records of the church in Ipswich have been lost 
and the town records at the beginning were very 
badly kept, there is no register of his marriage and no 
means of ascertaining the surname of his wife or to 
what family she belonged. But her Christian name 
was Ann, by which name she is referred to in his will 
as "my dear and beloved wife, Ann Choate." That 
is all that is known of her origin, but it is hoped that 
her family name will yet be discovered. 

He was diligent in his business and acquired a very 
considerable estate, so that by his will he was able to 
give substantial farms or tracts of real estate to four 
of his five sons and a handsome legacy, as things were 



[.8] 

at that time, to each of his two daughters. An in- 
ventory made of his estate amounted to 405 pounds 
and 13 shilHngs, and his will was witnessed by the 
celebrated minister of Ipswich, John Wise, to whose 
congregation he belonged, and Andrew Brown. 

His eldest son disputed the will because he did not 
receive by it a double portion, as seems to have been 
the fashion at that time, and a settlement was made 
between the widow, representing herself and two 
minor sons, Joseph and Benjamin, and the other 
three children. In the agreement by which the estate 
was settled, provision was made for Benjamin until 
he "comes to commence Bachelor of Arts, and to 
help bring up the said Benjamin in and at said Col- 
lege to that time." We know that he was graduated 
at Harvard in 1703, the earliest of the name in the 
catalogue, but this provision which was made by the 
settlement in 1697 must have covered the period of 
two years at school before he entered Harvard. 

John Choate and his third son, Thomas, have one 
truly valuable title to distinction, and that is that at 
the height of the witchcraft delusion, when almost 
everybody else was mad, they had the courage to 
sign a protest in behalf of John Proctor and his wife 
who are described* as "now in trouble and under sus- 
pition of witchcraft," which was in the highest degree 
significant. The protest was headed by John Wise; 
and the signatures of John Choate, Sr., and Thomas 

* In " Records of Salem Witchcraft," vol. I, W. Elliot Woodward, Roxbury, 
Mass., 1864. 



[ '9l 

Choate appear among the inhabitants of Ipswich 
who joined in it for the rescue o( two of the most 
conspicuous victims — their neighbor and his wife. 
Among other things they say: "What God may have 
left them to, we cannot go into God's pavilion clothed 
with clouds of darkness round about; but, as to what 
we have ever seen or heard of them, upon our con- 
sciences we judge them innocent of the crime ob- 
jected." As Upham, in his '* Histor>' of Salem Witch- 
craft," has truly said: "It is due to the memory of 
these signers that their names should be recorded, and 
their descendants may well be gratified by the testi- 
mony thus borne to their courage and justice." 

He had another greater title to distinction in that 
he was the progenitor of a long and widely scattered 
family that in each generation has done good service 
for its country. All oi the sons and the two daugh- 
ters married and had children. The families were 
large in those days and there is no wonder that in 
two hundred and forty-five years his seed has been 
widely disseminated. 

His third son, Thomas, from whom ^^■e are de- 
scended, was evidently more enterprising than either of 
his brothers, for he married three times; first, in 1690, 
when he was nineteen years old; second, in 1734. ^^ ^he 
age of SLXty-three; and third, in 174;. at the age of 
seventy-two; showing that he was not afraid of incur- 
ring the responsibilities of matrimony and paternity. 
His nine children all married and all had children, 
none of them less than four and one as manv as twelve. 



II 

HOG ISLAND 

Thomas Choate, who was born in 167 1 and died in 
1745 at the age of seventy-four, appears to have been 
a man of uncommon vigor and enterprise. He was 
undoubtedly a great farmer and a leading citizen of 
Ipswich, and their representative in the General 
Court for four years. He it was who acquired the land 
on Hog Island where he and his descendants have to 
this day continually resided. 

Life on the island, as everywhere in Ipswich in his 
time, must have been extremely simple and primi- 
tive. The habits and customs of the people cannot 
have changed much since the earliest settlement of 
the colony, and the only communication with the 
outside world appears to have been when the head of 
the family was sent to represent the town at the 
meetings of the General Court in Boston. 

The old-fashioned New England discipline pre- 
vailed. The father was the real head of the family; 
the mother was the mediator between him and the 
children, who were entirely subject to his sway. 

His third son, Francis, was my ancestor, born in 
1701 and died in 1777, and that generation appears 
to have come into great prominence in local and even 
State affairs. It has been said that among all the 

[20] 



HOG ISLAND. 

Named from the shape of the land. The land was acquired by John Choate 
the original emigrant. In 1690 his son, Thomas, married and lived there for 
thirty-five years. 



■m^''r-. 



CHOATE HOMESTEAD ON HOG ISLAND. 

Built in 1725 by Francis Choate, great-great-grandfather of J. H. C. Here, in 1799, 
Rufus Choate was born. The house and farm are still in the possession of his 
branch of the family. 



u 



a iC; 



1 re 



d a leadini^ citizt 

General 



.Ui.1A.JdI OOri 

.8ifi3-< avft-vJiirl) 



a.ri lo noiaa^aaoq srf, nr llm si^ rmsl bne ^,uod srlT .mod asv, m^oHO so1u« 



J 



[21] 

Choate ancestors none were so illustrious for their 
piety as were Esquire Francis and his good wife Han- 
nah. He was a ruling elder and is credited with 
having been a tower of strength in the Whitefield 
Movement, and to the end of his life the right-hand 
man of his pastor, the Reverend John Cleveland. 
Like many men of his time he was a slaveholder, but 
in his will he provided for the freedom of his slaves or 
for their comfortable support should they become 
aged and unable to work. 

But it was his elder brother, Colonel John Choate, 
who first of the family enacted a distinguished part in 
public affairs. In all that concerned the common- 
wealth he was extremely active and useful and was 
evidently a forceful character of great ability and 
activity. Between 1731 and 1760 he was elected fif- 
teen times as representative of Ipswich in the House 
of Representatives, and for five years he was a mem- 
ber of the Council. During his long term of legisla- 
tive service, he appears to have been on all important 
committees and on many special commissions. He 
was called upon to do duty on all sorts of important 
subjects. In 1741 he was elected speaker of the 
House, but Governor Belcher seems to have been dis- 
pleased and dissolved the House before anything fur- 
ther was done. 

The subjects on which Colonel John Choate was 
employed included the Land Bank, the settlement of 
the boundary between Rhode Island and Massa- 
chusetts, an inquiry as to who were formerly sufferers 



[22] 

as Quakers or on account of witchcraft and what satis- 
faction had been made by the General Court to such 
sufferers, on bills of credit, to ascertain their rate with 
gold and silver, and also on the bills of credit of other 
provinces, on the payment of taxes and other financial 
matters. He went on the expedition against Louis- 
burg with the recruits raised for that service, for 
which he had leave of the House to be absent, and 
was commissioned judge advocate of the Court of 
Admiralty at Louisburg after his arrival there with 
his troops. He also served on the committee on en- 
couraging manufactures and other industries of the 
province. He was chosen by the two Houses com- 
missioner to meet the Six Nations of New York. 
From 1735 to the time of his death, thirty years after- 
wards, he was constantly employed on important 
business for the commonwealth. 

And this did not distract him from purely local af- 
fairs, for in 1764, the year before his death, he built 
the famous Choate bridge over the Ipswich River, a 
stone bridge of beautiful proportions, which still 
stands secure as on the day it was opened, although 
its low arches were such a novelty in that region that 
its collapse with the first heavy load that went over 
it was loudly predicted, and great multitudes are said 
to have gathered to witness the catastrophe. 

His nephew, Stephen Choate, son of his brother 
Thomas, is also my ancestor, his daughter Susannah 
having married my grandfather George Choate, her 
cousin, and this Stephen, born in 1727 and who died 



[23] 

in 1 8 15, was also a great public character, besides 
having thirteen children and a great troop of descen- 
dants. 

In 1774 he was elected on the committee of corre- 
spondence which had so much to do with the origin 
of the great movements for independence which re- 
sulted in the establishment of the United States as an 
independent nation. He entered the General Court 
as a representative from Ipswich in May, 1776, when 
the court held its session at Watertown, Boston being 
in the hands of the British soldiers, and from that 
time he was annually re-elected until 1779, after 
which he became a member of the Senate and still 
later of the Council. He served for many years as 
county treasurer and was a constant and most useful 
public servant, and finally he was a member of the 
State convention that framed the celebrated Con- 
stitution of Massachusetts of 1780, which created for 
that State a government of laws and not of men. It 
was indeed the ideal model for all State constitutions. 

Not only by what he accomplished in life, but by 
the pictures of him that have come down to us, it is 
evident that Stephen Choate was a man of strong and 
robust character and of unyielding tenacity of pur- 
pose. He had a great old Roman nose, which still 
reappears occasionally in the family, and a chin that 
showed his indomitable will. And the charming pic- 
ture of his wife, Mary Low, which faces his, proves 
her to have been true to her vow to "love, honor, and 



[24] 

John Choate, the son of Elder Francis, was a dele- 
gate to the State convention that ratified and adopted 
the Federal Constitution in 1788, in which he seems 
to have taken an active part in support of the Con- 
stitution and seems to have had a clear appreciation 
of the merits of that great instrument, under which 
we still live. He participated intelligently in the de- 
bates, especially on the subject of taxation, as appears 
in "Elliot's Debates" and in those pubhshed by the 
legislature in 1856. 

But I must resume the story of my direct descent. 
William Choate, son of Francis, born on Hog Island 
September 5th, 1730, was the grandfather of my 
father. For many years he followed the sea, and be- 
came a shipmaster and owned vessels as well as com- 
manded them. Retiring from that, he established a 
school on Hog Island and gave his children an excel- 
lent education. 

I have in my possession his family Bible, not only 
dog-eared but the corners fairly worn away by the 
pious hands that turned them, and by this it ap- 
pears that everything on Hog Island was regulated 
by the tides, as they could only reach the mainland 
at highest water. I transcribe the entries of his 
family from this Bible, as long as he lived on the 
island : 

''William Choate (son of Francis Choate) & Mary 
Giddings (daughter of Job Giddings) were married 
Jan'y i6th, 1756, and October i8th, 1756 had a son 



[25] 

born, who lived but about four weeks — since had 
other children born (viz) 

"David Choate was born November 29th, 1757, 
Tuesday in ye morning. 

"William Choate was born Friday, August loth, 
1759 at high water. 

"George Choate was born Wednesday, February 
24th, 1764, low water in ye morning." 

So inveterate had the habit become of registering 
and commemorating the births of the children by the 
tide that, even after they had moved away from the 
island to the mainland and lived on farms looking 
across the brook to the island, they continued for 
a long time to record the births of the children in 
the same way, for in the same Bible I find the fam- 
ily record of my grandfather, George Choate, as 
follows : 

"George Choate, son of Captain William Choate 
and Susannah Choate, daughter of Stephen Choate, 
Esq., were married January ist, 1789, and Sunday, 
October i8th had a daughter still born, and since 
then had other children namely: 

"William Choate was born Tuesday, October 
26th, 1790 about eight o'clock in the evening, low 
water. 

"John Choate was born Monday, July i6th, 1792, 
about four o'clock in the afternoon and about low 
water. 



[26] 

"George Choate (that was my father) was born 
Monday, November 7th, 1796, at nine o'clock in the 
evening about four hours ebb." 

Captain WiUiam Choate appears to have been a 
highly intelligent person. He fitted for college in 
Salem, and his father desired him to graduate at the 
university and become a clergyman, but his own 
taste did not lie in that direction, and yet he was 
sufficiently self-educated to instruct his own four sons 
in navigation and other studies. 

They all followed the sea more or less. David 
(who was the father of Rufus) sailed to Spain and 
also to southern ports when a young man. His son 
William went to sea eight or ten years before his re- 
moval to Derry. George was a captain before he 
came to the island, and Job was a captain between 
Europe and America for twenty years. 

The lives of Captain William and his son George 
appear to have been singularly alike— simple, quiet, 
and unobtrusive, following the sea at times and farm- 
ing for the rest, holding important local public of- 
fices, and employed by their fellow townsmen in the 
management of their affairs and enjoying their full 
confidence and esteem. 

George represented the town of Ipswich from 18 14 
to 1 8 17, and the new town of Essex after it was set off 
in 1 8 19, and he held various other offices in the town. 
I transcribe from the notice which the Salem Ga- 
zette published of him at the time of his death, as fol- 
lows: 



[27] 

*'Few men have so well discharged the duties of 
husband, parent and citizen as Mr. Choate. He was 
for many years a member of the Legislature from Ips- 
wich, and the first representative from Essex, and was 
much employed by his townsmen in the management 
of their concerns, deservedly enjoying their highest 
confidence, respect and esteem. By them his useful- 
ness will be long remembered. To a strength and pu- 
rity of mind there was united a quiet, peaceful and 
amiable disposition, which greatly endeared him to 
his friends and acquaintances. So mindful was he of 
the rights of others that, as he never made an enemy, 
so certainly he has not left one; and we cannot but 
admire and wish to imitate that discipline of mind 
and feeling, which he so eminently manifested, and 
which enabled him to perform the duties and sustain 
the fatigues and ills of life without a murmur or com- 
plaint. The virtues of honest fidelity and benevo- 
lence will not perish with the body. For the upright 
and faithful there remaineth a rest. He was always 
deeply interested in the cause of education, and gave 
his hearty and constant support to the institutions of 
religion." 

He appears to have been the leading spirit in the 
movement for the separation of the Chebacco Ward in 
the town of Ipswich and its incorporation as a sepa- 
rate town in 1818, although such separation was 
steadily resisted by the inhabitants of the rest of the 
town. 

And there hang the portraits of my father and 



[28] 

mother, looking down upon me from the wall, photo- 
graphs taken at about the age of sixty, both very 
handsome, very earnest and a little anxious, the rea- 
son for which will appear. 

My father. Doctor George Choate, born at Che- 
bacco, November yth, 1796, was the sixth in descent 
from the original settler. He was prepared for col- 
lege under the tuition of the Reverend Doctor Wil- 
liam Cogswell, then master of the North District 
School in Chebacco, supplemented by a year in 
Dummer Academy and another year in Atkinson 
Academy. 

He entered Harvard in 1814 and graduated in the 
class of '18, which numbered eighty-one members, 
the largest at Harvard up to that time and until my 
own class of '52, which numbered eighty-eight, both 
in striking contrast to the enormous numbers in more 
recent classes. 

When he presented himself for examination, his 
name seemed to give great trouble to the examiners, 
for the Latin professor, who thought there must be 
one syllable for every separate vowel, in calling the 
list addressed him, as he told me, as "Co-a-te." 

His classmates included such men as Professor John 
Hooker Ashmun, Sidney Bartlett, Francis Brinley, 
William Emerson (the brother of Ralph Waldo Emer- 
son), the Reverend Doctors Farley and Noyes, and 
General Henry K. Oliver. 

The curriculum and routine of education, from 
what he told me, seems not to have changed much 



[29] 

from the earliest period, chiefly consisting of learning 
by rote and recitations from the books studied. 

Upon the subsequent settlement of his father's 
estate, which was inconsiderable in amount, a few 
years afterwards, it was found that George had re- 
ceived the whole amount of his share to pay for his 
education. In fact, from the time of his graduation 
he had to rely wholly upon his own resources, which 
made his professional and personal success in life cer- 
tain. 

To obtain the means of prosecuting his professional 
studies he was for two years master of the ** Feoffee's 
Latin School" in Ipswich, and at the same time was 
engaged in the study of medicine with the late Doctor 
Thomas Manning, a celebrated practitioner of his 
day, and two years more were spent in the office of the 
late Doctor George C. Shattuck, of Boston, one of the 
most eminent physicians of his time. His relations 
with Doctor Shattuck continued until the latter's 
death to be of a most friendly and cordial character. 
I well remember the kindly hospitality of the old gen- 
tleman at his stately residence at the corner of Cam- 
bridge and Staniford Streets in Boston, where he 
often entertained my brothers and myself while in 
college in the most paternal and friendly way. 

In 1822 he received the degree of M.D. at the Har- 
vard Medical School and immediately entered upon 
the practice of his profession in Salem. His success 
from the start was pronounced and continued for a 
period of nearly forty years. His practice extended 



[30] 

through the neighboring towns and involved the most 
strenuous labor, but he was not content with profes- 
sional success alone, for he was a man of genuine 
public spirit and took an active part in all the affairs 
of the community, which constantly relied upon his 
advice and assistance. 

For many years he was president of the Essex 
South District Medical Society and of the Salem 
Athenaeum. After withdrawing from practice, he rep- 
resented Salem for several years in the General 
Court, and previously he served efficiently as chair- 
man of the school committee and as an active mem- 
ber of the Board of Aldermen. 

He was a pillar of the First Church, the church of 
Francis Higginson and Hugh Peters and Roger Wil- 
liams. He was deeply interested in all the historical 
traditions of that ancient congregation, and at the 
installation of a new clergyman in 1848 he officiated 
as chairman of the committee, and, after the manner 
adopted by the brethren at the installation of Higgin- 
son and Skelton in 1629, made the address which in- 
ducted the new pastor into office, in exact conformity 
with what was done in the church at its foundation 
two hundred and nineteen years before. 

His interest in education was very remarkable and 
never-failing, and he heartily sustained the efforts of 
Horace Mann for the reform of the school system of 
Massachusetts, which wrought such a wonderful 
change in that system. I well remember his taking 
me with him in his chaise to Topsfield, where he went 



[31] 

to attend a teachers' convention at which Mr. Mann 
was to be present. And as the distinguished reformer 
was desirous of getting to Salem that night my 
father invited him to drive home with him, and as 
there was no other place for me I sat all the way 
upon Mr. Mann's lap, which I have always regarded 
as the actual beginning of my education. 

The lives of my father and mother were truly 
heroic in the matter of the training of their own chil- 
dren. Having four sons and two daughters, they de- 
termined at all hazards to give them the best educa- 
tion that the times afforded, and in so doing they set 
them a wonderful example of self-control, self-denial, 
and self-sacrifice. Everything else was subordinated 
to this high ideal and they denied themselves every- 
thing else to accomplish this lofty purpose. • 

At that period I cannot recall my father ever taking 
a holiday, except for one hot afternoon in summer, 
when he drove the whole family in a carry-all to 
Phillips's Beach for a sail and a fish supper. All the 
rest of the time, summer and winter, was devoted 
without stint to constant work. 

Social enjoyments were very limited and our family 
life was in striking contrast to that which prevails 
among well-to-do people to-day. But they succeeded 
to a very remarkable degree and gave their children 
an inheritance which was far more precious than any 
amount of wealth would have been. Many a time 
have I seen him pay out what was nearly his last 
dollar for the settlement of our college bills, and 



[32] 

all he had to give us by will was a hundred dollars 
apiece. 

But his triumph was of the most signal character, 
for the Harvard College annual catalogue of 1848-49 
contained the names of all his four sons, one a medical 
student, one a senior, and two freshmen. And when 
I recall that all this was accomplished out of his nar- 
row professional income, when his ordinary fee for a 
visit was seventy-five cents and seven dollars and a 
half for bringing a new child into the world, it is 
hardly possible to conceive how he could have done it. 

But they had their reward in the success of their 
sons and daughters and in their most fervent grati- 
tude. I remember that when my brother William 
and I graduated at Harvard in 1852, WiUiam was the 
first scholar in the class; so much so that there was 
really nobody second, and the faculty with an un- 
usual manifestation of sentiment gave him at com- 
mencement the Valedictory Oration which was his as 
a matter of right, and to me, although I was only the 
fourth scholar, the Salutatory Oration, which did not 
belong to me at all, so that we sandwiched the class 
between us in the exercises of that day. 

And when my mother appeared, with her character- 
istic modesty and shyness, Mrs. Sparks, the wife of 
the president, greeted her with the question: "Why, 
Mrs. Choate, how did you come up from Salem V 

My mother answered: "I came in the usual way, 
by the train to Boston and to Cambridge in the om- 
nibus." 



[33] 

Mrs. Sparks exclaimed: "You ought not to have 
come in that way; you ought to have come in a 
chariot drawn by peacocks. Such a thing as this has 
never been known before in the history of Harvard — 
two brothers sandwiching the class on the commence- 
ment programme!" 

I suppose there may be many similar examples of 
parental devotion and self-sacrifice among us to-day, 
but they are not apparent. In those days the rule 
was duty first and pleasure afterwards, and if duty 
occupied all the time it must be performed at all 
risks and let the pleasure go. Nowadays, so far as I 
can observe, among successful people pleasure oc- 
cupies a much more prominent place and is not neces- 
sarily sacrificed to duty. When I look around me and 
see fathers and mothers devoted to pleasure, to 
bridge-parties and dancing and the various other 
forms of social entertainment, I often wonder what 
the moral effect will be upon their children who can- 
not help seeing it all. 

At any rate, the old way created an indissoluble 
bond between parents and children, and for one, 
throughout life I have never made any important de- 
cision without wondering what my father and mother 
would have said about it. 

Some day the present carnival of sport and plea- 
sure will be checked and an era of self-denial and sacri- 
fice will come again. Fathers and mothers such as I 
have described mine to have been do really constitute 
the pride and glory of the commonwealth, as they 



[34] 
have been from the earUest days of the colony, when 
everything else was subordinated to working out the 
salvation of themselves and their children. Of course, 
it is money that is doing the mischief, and fortunately 
does not affect nine-tenths of the people of the coun- 
try, who have really to work for their daily bread; 
among whom must in every generation be found 
thousands of instances of parents who sacrifice the 
present to the future and forego everything else to 
make sure of the education of their children. 

My father at last paid a fearful penalty for the 
constant overwork and nervous tension of his earlier 
years, for at about the age when his father and grand- 
father had died, his health failed entirely, and he 
lived an invalid for more than seventeen years. It 
was here that the supreme patience and fortitude of 
my mother, which she had derived constitutionally 
from her father, proved such a priceless blessing in 
enabling her during that long period to comfort and 
care for him. 



DOCTOR GEORGE CHOATE. 

Born at Ipswich, 1 796; died at Cambridge, 1 880, in the eighty-fourth year of 
his age — father of J. H. C. This silhouette was evidently made as he approached 
middle age. 



pi< 



.3TA0HD aoaoao hotdoq 



Ill 

CHILDHOOD 

And now I come to my own birth, which took place 
at Salem on the 24th of January, 1832. I have never 
had my horoscope cast, but it must have been pro- 
pitious to account for the cheerful temperament 
which has marked my whole life, always looking on 
the bright side and making the best of everything as 
it came, which has been in itself a great fortune, 
worth more than many millions. 

The earliest written record of my appearance in the 
world is contained in a letter written on the following 
Sunday by one of my aunts to another, in which she 
says: 

"Margaret was confined last Tuesday with the 
largest boy she ever had. She continued comfortable 
for three days. Since I have not heard, but pre- 
sume she remained so. She has put her child out to 
nurse.'* 

As I was the fifth child and the fourth boy, the 
oldest not yet five, my size spoke well for me at the 
start, and the reason that I was put away so sum- 
marily was that all the other children at the time had 
the whooping-cough, for in those da^^s it was sup- 
posed, as I believe it is now, that the whooping-cough 
was fatal to new-born infants. 

[35] 



[36] 

At any rate, I was wrapped up in a blanket im- 
mediately after my birth and carried over to the 
banks of the North River, where the selected nurse, 
Mrs. Law, dwelt, and there I remained for seventeen 
months, which can only be accounted for on the 
theory that I was regarded at home as one too many, 
who would be only in the way if returned to the pa- 
rental mansion. 

There was once a malicious suggestion that during 
this protracted separation from the family my iden- 
tity was in some mysterious way changed, and that 
I was only a changeling after all. But one had only 
to look at my mother's features, which were exactly 
like my own, to see how groundless this suspicion was. 
It only had its origin in the fact that I was really 
quite unlike all the rest of the children in temper and 
disposition. 

This must have had some effect upon my character 
at that early day, for my mother, writing to her sister- 
in-law on the loth of February, 1834, says: "I have 
no baby you know to keep me at home, for Joseph is 
two years old, although rather troublesome. He was 
seventeen months old when we took him home. He 
had been indulged so much we found him rather diffi- 
cult to manage," a condition which, I fear, continued 
some time afterwards; but, anyhow, I had to fight for 
my place in the family and gradually secured it. 

But I was not long to enjoy undisturbed the do- 
mestic felicity of home which I had thus regained. 
In those days, when servants were few and nurses for 



[37] 

the children almost unknown, the sooner they were 
sent to school the better for all concerned, and it 
must have been an immense relief to my mother for a 
great part of the day when all the five children were 
already in school.; My earliest recollection is of being 
taken by the hand by my brother William, who was 
a year and- a half older — I was two and a half — and 
led to the Dame's School, which I attended until I was 
seven years old. 

It was the simplest affair possible, kept by an aged 
spinster, Miss Lewis, and her widowed sister, Mrs. 
Streeter, and attended by some twenty boys and 
girls, the children of our neighbors and friends. 

I perfectly remember my first morning at the 
school, when I was put in charge of the biggest girl 
among the scholars, who afterwards became a digni- 
fied matron of the city, the wife of a distinguished 
lawyer and the mother of a considerable family. 
The schoolroom was of moderate dimensions, the 
boys upon one side of the stove, which occupied the 
centre, and the girls upon the other. 

The only punishment that I remember at the school 
for any boy who misbehaved was to be put over to sit 
among the girls. This was a little awkward at first, 
but I soon got used to it and liked it very much. 

It was like a modern kindergarten without the ap- 
paratus, but we did learn to read and write and cipher 
there, so that I cannot recall the time when I could 
not do all of those things. 

Mr. William M. Evarts, with whom I long after- 



[38] 

wards became associated, is recorded in the life of his 
father to have read the Bible perfectly well at three 
years old. I do not think that I was quite equal to 
that, but certainly had begun to read at that age. 

The surroundings of the school were attractive. 
Across Sewall Street, where it was situated, and this 
was within a stone's throw of my father's house, there 
was a wheelwright, and it was great fun for the chil- 
dren to gather about this skilful mechanic and watch 
his work. His name was Ira Patch. At the corner, 
as we turned into Sewall Street from Essex Street, 
was quite a noted hardware store kept by Robert 
Peele, and his shop-window with its wonderful collec- 
tion of all kinds of hardware was a constant attrac- 
tion. But best of all, in immediate contiguity with 
the schoolhouse, was a famous blacksmith shop kept 
by Benjamin Cutts, whose forge in active operation 
it was a daily delight to watch. He was something 
more to us than a mere neighbor, for sometimes, when 
one of the boys, who was constitutionally refractory, 
became unmanageable the schoolmistress called out: 
"Send for Mr. Cutts ! Send for Mr. Cutts !" and the 
sturdy blacksmith came in to the rescue and sup- 
pressed the offender. 

These dame's schools were a peculiar and very im- 
portant institution of New England and had been so 
from its foundation. Each was entirely independent, 
related in no way to any other school, and contributed 
substantially to the support of otherwise helpless 
dames and to the welfare of their little charges. I 



[39] 

have no Idea or recollection of what the tuition-fees 
were, but they must have been infinitely small. And 
yet they constituted all that my father ever paid for 
my education until I entered Harvard College. 

The town schools at that time were in an extremely 
rude and primitive state, very much as they must 
have been for two hundred years at least. I remem- 
ber perfectly well being taken by the hand by my 
father the morning I was seven years old and taken 
to the public school, an alarming experience, indeed, 
for the master, Abner Brooks, had the reputation of 
being a perfect terror. He was a weakly man and 
made up for that infirmity by a liberal use of the cow- 
hide, which he applied very freely. 

The Centre School, as it was called, was in Wash- 
ington Street, and was kept in one large room, where 
there must have been about fifty boys from seven 
years old to fifteen. We sat on benches, which 
stretched across the room from front to rear with an 
aisle between, on a sloping floor, and as the youngest 
boys were on the back seat, I was marched up in the 
face of the whole room to my place there. It was 
really a terrible experience. 

All the teaching was done by this one man, who 
heard the successive classes recite from nine to twelve 
in the morning and from two to five in the afternoon. 
At the close of every day a group of offenders were 
stopped after school to receive the application of the 
rod, and this was in addition to the use of the long 
rod which would reach the backs of half a dozen boys 



[40] 

on the same bench and was appHed from the central 
aisle. 

On the whole, it was a pretty brutal affair. There 
were no games and no recreation at the school. The 
only thing that might be so considered was when a 
new load of wood came. The best boys were allowed 
to get it in, which was regarded as a special privilege. 
Certainly there must have been much waste of time 
in the years that I spent at that school. 

The master had no special gift for teaching. It 
certainly was a dreary routine, with little to mitigate 
the rudeness and dreariness of it. But now and then, 
when our school-teacher felt uncommonly well, he 
would make us a little speech and say that hereafter 
he was going to rule by love, and as proof of it he 
would cut up both his cowhides and have them burned 
up in the stove. But in a few days this did not prove 
satisfactory, and new rods were purchased and never 
spared for fear of spoiling the children. 

Happily for us all, Horace Mann soon came to the 
rescue and convinced the people of Massachusetts 
that decent and sanitary schoolhouses and humane 
treatment and skilled teachers really qualified for 
their task, were the best investment that the State 
could make. New schoolhouses of fine proportions, 
built on sanitary principles, began to rise throughout 
the State of Massachusetts, normal schools came into 
being, and a board of education was created which 
bore the responsibility of the general conduct of these 
schools throughout the State. The ancient town of 



[41] 

Salem, at the time of my birth not yet a city, was a 
unique and most wholesome place in which to be 
born and bred. It was a place of about fifteen thou- 
sand inhabitants, fourteen miles from Boston, to and 
from which city the stage ran every day but Sunday. 
It had two newspapers, The Salem Register and The 
Salem Gazette, printed by hand-presses, and published 
each twice a week, so that we were comparatively se- 
cluded from the rest of the world, hearing from Boston 
every afternoon, from New York about twice a week, 
and from Europe about once a month. Consequently 
our people were thrown very much upon themselves 
and took an intense interest in local affairs, and had 
but a scanty knowledge of what was going on in the 
rest of the world. Steam and electricity had not yet 
begun their wonderful work there, friction-matches 
were just invented and regarded as a great curiosity, 
and I remember my father bringing home a piece of 
anthracite coal, a kind of fuel hitherto wholly un- 
known, and making great complaint because, when 
put in the fireplace, it would not burn. 

We lived in an old brick house of large dimensions, 
looking out upon the west upon the grounds of Bar- 
ton Square Church with their fine elm-trees and with 
a great garden in the rear. There was no furnace in 
the house, the only mode of heating being by stoves 
and open grates and fireplaces for wood, of which I 
remember only three, one in my father's office, one in 
mother's room, and one in a large sitting-room, where 
we all sat and lived and worked together. There was 



[42] 

no gas as yet and our only lights were candles, brass 
oil-lamps, and astral lamps with glass chimneys and 
shades, which gave the best light we had. 

This house had been purchased by my grandfather 
Hodges just before the marriage of my father and 
mother, as the deed of record in the Registry of Deeds 
shows. It had already some historic interest, for it 
was there that Count Rumford, then known as Ben- 
jamin Thompson, served his apprenticeship in the 
general store of Mr. Appleton, who then owned the 
house. This must have been a few years before the 
outbreak of the Revolutionary War, for his biography 
says that he was at the age of fourteen sufficiently 
advanced in algebra, chemistry, astronomy, and even 
the higher mathematics to calculate a solar eclipse 
within four seconds of accuracy. Certainly he was 
one of the earliest of infant phenomena. It is fur- 
ther recorded that in 1776 he was apprenticed to a 
storekeeper in Salem, and while in that employment 
occupied himself in chemical and mechanical experi- 
ments, as well as engraving, in which he attained 
some proficiency. The outbreak of the Revolution- 
ary War put a stop to the trade of his master, and he 
thereupon left Salem and went to Boston, where he 
engaged himself as assistant in another store, and 
began his wonderful and most romantic career, marry- 
ing at nineteen a woman of property, his senior by 
fourteen years, sailing for England on the evacuation 
of Boston by the royal troops in 1776, knighted by 
George the Third, and all the time making very im- 



HOUSE OF DOCTOR GEORGE CHOATE ON ESSEX STREET, SALEM. 

This house was given to Mrs. George Choate by her father, Gamaliel Hodges, on the 
occasion of her marriage to Doctor Choate, and here all her six children were 
born. It was also in this house that Count Rumford served as apprentice to 
Mr. Appleton before the Revolutionary War. 



HODGES HOUSE ON ESSEX STREET, SALEM. 

A good specimen of the style of the period. Owned by John Hodges, uncle 
of J. H. C. 



i J JXij/'i'J-: J 



xit ihI Mj: •-■:• 
'.t bsviss t 



rv- 



.3 H .1 V. 



[43] 

portant inventions and discoveries, many of which 
have lasted until the present day, made a count of 
the Holy Roman Empire by the King of Bavaria, and 
marrying for his second wife the wealthy widow of 
Lavoisier, the great French chemist who was guil- 
lotined by Robespierre for his great services to man- 
kind. I am sorry to say that with his last wife he led 
an extremely uncomfortable life, until at last they 
agreed to separate, and he died in peace in 1 8 14, \\ 

having established Rumford Medals in the Royal 
Society and the American Academy of Arts and 
Sciences, and the Rumford Professorship in Harvard 
University. How much of this erratic and successful 
career was due to his long residence as apprentice in 
our house, it is hard to say, but we may claim the 
credit of all that was creditable in it. 



IV 

SALEM 

Salem, which continued to be my home for the first 
twenty-three years of my life, was a most unique and 
delightful place. It was so old, so queer, so different 
from all other places upon which the sun in his west- 
ern journey looked down, so full of grand historical 
reminiscences, so typical of everything that has ever 
occurred in the annals of American life, that it was a 
great piece of good fortune to be born there. The 
natives of the place were a little older to the cubic 
inch than men born at exactly the same moment in 
any other part of America. It could not possibly be 
otherwise with human beings born and bred in those 
old houses, which have cradled so many of our race 
for upwards of two centuries, that humanity itself 
had got used to being started there, and found itself 
an old story at the beginning. Comparing a new-born 
Salem baby with an infant born at the same moment 
in Kansas, or Colorado, or Montana, I venture to say 
that the microscope would disclose a physical differ- 
ence, a slight — perhaps a very slight — mould of an- 
tiquity, which all the waters of Wenham Pond could 
never wash away. 

It was the very spot where Endicott had landed in 

[44] 



[45] 

1628, and John Winthrop, the leader of the great 
Puritan host which came over in 1629. It had been 
the scene of the terrible witchcraft delusion in 1692, 
when all the people of Massachusetts, from the gov- 
ernor down, led by the infernal doctrines of the 
clergy of that day, headed by the notorious Cotton 
Mather, really believed that satan himself was actu- 
ally present among them seeking whom he might de- 
vour; all which resulted in the cruel slaughter upon 
the gallows of twenty of the most respectable people 
of the place, and left a cloud upon its good name 
which will never be effaced. 

In the early part of the eighteenth century Gov- 
ernor Burnett had transferred the General Court to 
Salem, but they refused to do any business there be- 
cause it was not their proper place, and again when 
General Gage, in 1774, arrived he attempted to trans- 
fer the legislature to Salem, which was the scene of 
great activity and conflict between the royal author- 
ities and the people during that year. It has always 
been claimed by the people at Salem that the first 
blood of the Revolution was shed there at the old 
North Bridge when Colonel Leslie one Sunday morn- 
ing led a company of royal troops from Marblehead 
to capture a quantity of arms and munitions stored 
there, but was dissuaded from making the seizure by 
the influence of its leading citizens. 

From the beginning the port had been the scene of 
a steadily growing commerce, Salem ships being the 
first to penetrate the distant regions of India and 



[46] 

China, and bringing home cargoes of fabulous value, 
which enriched many of the leading people. Many- 
great fortunes had been made there, most of which 
had already been transmitted to the second genera- 
tion before my birth. 

The First Church in Salem, in which I was brought 
up (being required to attend two sessions there every 
Sunday, summer and winter, rain or shine), had 
maintained its position on the same spot from the 
earliest days of the colony. It was the church of 
Francis Higginson and Roger Williams and Hugh 
Peters, all of whom had been driven from England in 
the days of the tyranny of Archbishop Laud, as non- 
conformists. It was within the walls of this church 
that Anne Hutchinson and the Quakers had made 
their unseemly demonstration, for which they had 
been expelled from the colony, but non-conformity 
seemed to be deeply rooted in the soil of the church, 
and in my boyhood it was one of the most pronounced 
Unitarian churches in the whole commonwealth. 

All these historical reminiscences and traditions 
hung over the place and made a deep impression upon 
the minds of sensitive and impressionable children 
who were brought up there even down to my time, 
and these impressions were greatly confirmed by the 
wonderful writings of Hawthorne in all his books re- 
lating to colonial history. We loved to wander at 
large within the narrow limits of the old town, en- 
deavoring to locate the places where its notable celeb- 
rities in former generations had acted their parts. 



[47] 

At the time of my birth Salem was an extremely 
isolated place, practically shut in from the rest of the 
world. There was daily stage communication from 
Boston, which ran on to the eastward through the 
town, and the life there was extremely simple. The 
commerce of the place had practically dried up, and 
there was only the local trade for the supply of the 
necessities of the inhabitants and of those who came 
in from the neighboring country to do their shop- 
ping. The population was homogeneous, pure English 
throughout. The great tide of Irish immigration had 
hardly begun, although a few straggling Irish girls 
could be found in the kitchens, but I can only recall 
two foreigners among the better class of the people, 
one an Italian music-master, and another a French 
refugee, both gentlemen of excellent quality. 

Neither steam nor electricity had yet been intro- 
duced in any form, but they were soon to come, for 
one of my very earliest recollections was in 1837, when 
I was five years old, being taken by my father to the 
top of Castle Hill, which lay to the south of the town, 
to see the first railroad-train come in from Boston. 
Compared with any railroad-train now known it was 
a very petty and puny affair, a little engine with two 
small-sized passenger-cars and what was called a 
** nigger car" attached for colored people to ride in. 
Samples of such primitive trains are always shown 
now as exhibits from the earliest railroads as examples 
of the beginning of the transportation system of the 
United States. 



[48] 

That was truly the beginning of the Hfe of the place 
which had been slumbering for years since its sea- 
board and seaborne life had died away. I was liter- 
ally born into a wholly different life from any that 
we know anything about to-day. The town was dead 
before this first railroad-train arrived, and from that 
moment it really began to wake up. In fact, for a 
time, the coming of the train from Boston was the sig- 
nal for a great assemblage of the younger people at 
the station to see the train come in. There were no 
time-tables, and the coming and departure of trains 
was announced by an old Revolutionary soldier, a 
veteran corporal, who became well known to all the 
boys in town, Corporal Pitman, and the local rhyme 
ran: 

"Who rings the eastern railroad bell. 

And makes its notes with power tell, 

And who can do it half so well 
As Corporal ?" 

Two years afterwards the eastern railroad was ex- 
tended to Beverly, two miles beyond, and to accom- 
plish this, what appeared to our childish imaginations 
to be an enormous tunnel was dug through the centre 
of the town from river to river, at least fifty feet deep 
and still more broad, which cut the town in halves, 
and when it was finished and the trains ran through 
to Beverly and beyond, Salem had awakened from 
its lethargy and was really in touch with the rest of 
the world. 

We were very proud of our local celebrities, es- 



[49] 

pecially if they had attained to great national and 
pubHc reputation, and one of my earUest reminis- 
cences is being sent home from church one hot Sun- 
day afternoon, at the close of the service, to make 
room for a grown person to attend the eulogy to be 
pronounced upon Doctor Bowditch, the great mathe- 
matician and navigator. I could not have made room 
for a very large person, because I was then only six 
years old, but every inch of space in the First Church 
was required for so celebrated an occasion. 

Life in those days was a steady round of work, even 
for the young people, with very little play and still 
less decoration. The clothes of all classes and both 
sexes were very plain, and the cuisine and the food 
were very simple. It is true that there were some 
very rich people in the town, who had inherited and 
divided the wealth of the great merchants of the 
previous age, but the rest of the people who were en- 
gaged in earning their own living and ours had not 
much to do with them. They had some pictures and 
statuary that, I believe, were of no great account, and 
there was no opportunity for the study of art except 
at the famous East India Marine Museum, which was 
organized in the early part of the century and com- 
posed of seafaring men who had navigated Cape Horn 
or the Cape of Good Hope as master or supercargo, 
and had brought home curiosities from distant parts 
of the world, which were the chief riches of their mu- 
seum. But it did hold two wonderful casts that made 
a great impression on my mind, one of the Laocoon, and 



[50] 

the other of the boy seated and picking a thorn out of 
his foot, which are still very famous among the artistic 
treasures of Europe, and there also were products of 
Chinese and Indian art which compared well with 
more modern importations from those distant regions. 

I believe that Salem in the time of my boyhood 
could boast of a greater proportion of living Harvard 
graduates than any other town in the State, for those 
old merchants had had the wit to send their sons to 
college, and every year a liberal contingent of candi- 
dates were sent to Cambridge. 

For a place of its size, too, Salem was well supplied 
with local newspapers, which held a high reputation 
in the ranks of the American press. The Salem Regis- 
ter and The Salem Gazette. The Gazette had had a long 
career and was a dignified paper of somewhat aristo- 
cratic tone, while The Register had started as a Demo- 
cratic paper and was much patronized by Judge 
Storey, who, I believe, had something to do with 
editing it in his early days, and who wrote the verse 
which it always maintained at its head: 

"Here shall the press the people's rights maintain 
Unawed by influence, and unbribed by gain 
Here patriot truth its sacred precepts draw 
Pledged to Religion, Liberty and Law." 

Each of these came out twice a week. The Register 
on Monday and Thursday, and The Gazette on Tues- 
day and Friday, and that was about all the people 
could bear, for an attempt to convert The Gazette into 



[51] 

a triweekly paper after we began to have daily papers 
from Boston proved an entire failure, and was stig- 
matized by the boys with a contemptuous verse: 
** Triweekly, but try in vain." Like the local press 
of every suburban town, it had to yield at last to the 
greater success and value of the metropolitan jour- 
nals. 

Our sports consisted in the winter of an occasional 
sleigh-ride, and in the summer of a few rude games at 
school during recess, and ranging over the great pas- 
tures, which were a relict of colonial days when rights 
were acquired by the inhabitants who kept cows, 
which gave them right to pasture them within its 
limits. These pastures extended all the way from 
Salem to Lynn, and were great places of resort. My 
father also kept cows, never less than two, which we 
took care of and milked and drove to pasture, and 
thought we enjoyed it, and I had special opportu- 
nities for driving about, as my father often took me in 
his chaise, on his round of professional visits, to hold 
the horse. 

We also had much to do with assisting my mother 
about the household work, for servants were very 
few in those days and large families were brought up 
with the aid of not more than one or two servants 
with occasional help of chorewomen called in for the 
purpose, but we did have a good, sound, wholesome 
training and education in schools of a high character 
which then sprang up all over the State under the in- 
spiration of Horace Mann, and the brutality that had 



[52] 

been maintained steadily in the first grammar-school 
that I attended, with its squalid accompaniments, 
was speedily put an end to. Flogging which had 
there prevailed to an unlimited extent was practi- 
cally abolished, although the right to punish in that 
way was still reserved for serious cases. 

I have said that our education was all without cost 
to my father until we entered Harvard, but I do not 
mean training in the accomplishments of life, for 
I was sent to three institutions of that kind, the 
dancing-school under the famous Papanti, the sing- 
ing-school under Jacob Hood, and a drawing-school 
under Robert Conner, who was, I believe, an imported 
Irishman and a very good teacher; but the results in 
these three establishments were not very flattering 
to my pride, for I remember on one occasion, after a 
serious trip-up, being sent home by Papanti with a 
message to my parents that I was a disgrace to my 
family, and after I had cultivated the art of drawing, 
as I supposed with success, for about two years, Mr. 
Conner took my father aside and whispered to him 
confidentially that he need not send me any more to 
the school, because he really could not teach me any 
more, and in singing-school I never reached the dig- 
nity of singing alone, but only in very bad school 
choruses. 

As my youthful years progressed there was one 
form of entertainment that I found most useful and 
instructive. I mean the lyceum lectures that at that 
time prevailed generally throughout New England in 



tei.;^ 



[53] 

the larger towns and cities in the winter season. We 
regarded it as a great thing to have the most distin- 
guished men of letters in the country come and de- 
liver discourses on interesting subjects, and I believe 
that I was always a faithful attendant in all the later 
years of my school days on these courses. When such 
men as Doctor Holmes and Mr. Emerson, James Rus- 
sell Lowell, and their distinguished colleagues in 
Boston came, we hung upon their lips with the most 
devout attention. I believe that this form of enter- 
tainment afterwards declined, owing, I suppose, to 
the universal introduction of magazines and weeklies 
which brought home to every house instruction in 
similar subjects as those to which we had been so long 
used in the lectures of the lyceum. 

There was also another form of entertainment 
which, as the years advanced, I found especially fas- 
cinating and which, perhaps, had some influence in 
shaping my subsequent career, and that was atten- 
dance upon the sessions of the higher courts of record, 
the business of which, so far as it pertained to any- 
thing like local importance in Essex County, had not 
yet been absorbed, as it now is, by the greater city of 
Boston. The sessions of the Supreme Court, pre- 
sided over by Chief Justice Shaw and his associates, 
were always a great attraction, especially in the jury 
trials, where the jurors were selected, two panels for 
each term, and composed of citizens of high char- 
acter, and these drew for their professional labors men 
of distinction from other counties besides Essex. 



[54] 

I remember well seeing and hearing Samuel Hoar, 
of Concord, Rufus Choate, of Boston, Benjamin F. 
Butler and Thomas Hopkinson, of Lowell, Otis P. 
Lord, who was aften^'ards a valuable judge of the 
Supreme Court, and many other distinguished men, 
and it was a special treat to me to hear their dis- 
cussions and contests with each other and with the 
members of the Salem bar, which was then still of 
great importance, and in the absence of theatres, 
which were up to that time unknown in Salem, these 
sessions of the court afforded quite as much tragedy 
and comedy as any ordinary theatre would have 
done. 

\ The preparation for college was of the best quality 
tntn known, and I think quite as good as any that 
has succeeded it up to the present time. After a full 
course in the common schools and three years in the 
high school, covering the ordinary branches of Eng- 
lish school education, we had a special school where 
nothing was taught but Greek, Latin, and mathe- 
matics, and all by a single teacher who was a special 
expert in the preparation of boys for college, although 
his original training in English must have been some- 
what imperfect, as it had not rescued him from the 
frequent use of the double negative, and the boys in 
the school amused themselves by getting up an exag- 
gerated example of this as illustrative of his mode of 
addressing blockheads that came under his hands, 
something like this: 

** You don't know nothing, and you never did know 



GAMALIEL HODGES— 1766-1850. 

Grandfather of J. H. C. From a pastel portrait painted in Antwerp, when 
"Captain" Hodges, as a young sea captain, roamed the sea. He lived to be 
over eighty-four years old, and only sur\-ived his wife two months. Their 
married life lacked but six days of lasting sixty-two years. 



> .H i io VafiftaibnMO 

...:-■.. i-; ^a^fcoH "iji£."isJ" 
, bas .bio eni!5'{ u '^ 



[55] 

nothing, and it don't seem as if I could not never 
teach you nothing nohow apparently." 

But he was a splendid teacher, nevertheless, and 
got us all into college with flying colors. I believe 
that this school has been absorbed now and made a 
part of the high school, which, in my judgment, was 
a sad departure from the very best method as it then 
prevailed in Salem, in Boston, and in Roxbur>-, the 
Latin schools of which sent the best-prepared stu- 
dents to enter at Harvard. 

This school was claimed to be the first public school 
in the colony of Massachusetts, although I think that 
the claim of the Boston Latin school to have preceded 
it in its origin may have some foundation, but as 
Salem was founded some ten years before Boston, I 
have always been inclined to believe that this school 
was the first in the colony, and that in some way or 
other it had been continued uninterruptedly down to 
my time. 

At any rate there was inscribed upon the wall of 
the schoolroom the words '"Schola publica prima," 
and the name of George Downing as its first pupil. 
Of this antiquity \\ e members of the school were not 
a little proud, as it seemed to give a sort of historical 
renown and certainly an interesting tradition to the 
school. 

This George Downing afterwards became a mem- 
ber of the first class that graduated at Harvard Col- 
lege in 1642, where his name is entered "George 
Downing, Knight 1660, Baronet 1663, Tutor, Am- 



[56] 

bassador to Netherlands from Cromwell and Charles 
Second, M. P.," and as the names of the members of 
the class were then entered according to social dis- 
tinction of their family his name appears second, as 
he was a nephew of John Winthrop, the founder of the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We always en- 
joyed the idea of having been schoolmates of this 
celebrity, although two hundred years apart. 

I remember referring to this at a lord mayor's din- 
ner in London, in 1902 I think it was, when I was 
called upon to speak for the diplomatic corps, and I 
gave them the history of George Downing as I had 
studied it out for the occasion; how he had been 
secretary of the treasury in England in 1667, and had 
represented England at the Netherlands as ambas- 
sador from Charles the First, from Cromwell, and 
from Charles the Second; what a wonderful turncoat 
he had been to be permitted to represent the Pro- 
tector as well as the two Stuart Kings who preceded 
and followed him; how by the favor of Charles the 
Second he had acquired a vast tract of land in Lon- 
don, in close proximity to what is now the very seat 
of government, all of which had disappeared except 
the little cul-de-sac called Downing Street, which 
leads in to the Foreign Office, so that his name is 
stamped indelibly upon the very seat and centre of 
the British Empire, as I had hoped that it would be 
upon the school which he and I attended. 

When I sat down, Lord Salisbury, who was then 
prime minister and had made the great speech of the 



[57] 

evening, turned to me and said: "Where did you find 
out all that ? I never heard anything about it." And 
I repHed: "Why, I made a special study of it, as I 
felt I ought to know the history of the spot on which 
all my official business in England was conducted." 

Before I bid farewell to Salem I ought to say that 
Salem as I knew it when I left to go to Harvard, in 
1848, still remains practically unmarred and undis- 
turbed by the late terrible conflagration there. All 
the streets, highways, and byways that I knew as a 
boy still remain as they were, and only a great ex- 
terior range of buildings, stores, and residences which 
had been built up since that day were destroyed in 
the fire, which called the attention of the whole world 
in 191 2 to that ancient town. 

There must have been something in the air of 
Salem or in the tone of the school which gave special 
vitality to the boys who were educated there, for of 
my class at Harvard, which consisted of eighty-eight 
members, gathered from all parts of the country, 
there are at the time of the present writing five sur- 
vivors, four of whom entered with me at the Salem 
Latin School, and from there we proceeded together 
to the college. 

I think that like the other towns on the eastern 
shore of Massachusetts, which were all of purely Eng- 
lish origin, Salem must have retained by tradition 
many usages of transatlantic origin or derived from 
the customs of the first settlers. For instance, the 
curfew bell which, I believe, still rings regularly as it 



[58] 

has for the last two hundred and seventy-five years 
was certainly an importation from the old country, 
and the town crier must have been of similar origin. 
He was employed to give notices of sales, losses of 
children, losses of dogs, and other important local 
events. He carried a hand-bell and would stop at 
each corner as he passed down Essex Street and ring 
the bell with all his might, and we gathered about him 
with great interest to hear the news, whatever it 
might be, as with a stentorian voice that could be 
heard the length of a block he would utter his im- 
portant intelligence, while we all listened with mouths 
and ears wide open. And then there was the local 
vendor, a quaint old Frenchman, old Monarque, 
whose name must be added to our foreigners of dis- 
tinction, for he dealt in a very limited number of ar- 
ticles as he drove his push-cart all about the town, 
shouting in broken English: "Pickledy limes, and 
tamadirinds, two for a cent a piece." This, too, must 
have been an old English mode of advertising before 
the days of newspapers. 

In the First Church, of which my father was a pillar, 
which had become under the influence of Channing a 
very strong Unitarian body, when they came to in- 
stall a new clergyman in 1848, instead of having a 
clerical array of participants to administer the laying 
on of hands, the service was performed by Doctor 
Choate, who delivered an address on the occasion, 
and it was said that the proceedings were exactly like 
those which had taken place two hundred and nine- 



[59] 

teen years before when the church was first es- 
tabHshed. 

Wednesday afternoon, Hke Saturday afternoon, 
was always a general hoHday for the schools, because 
in the early colony days there was a religious lecture 
delivered every Wednesday, and from that time down 
the Wednesday holiday was called lecture afternoon. 

So, also, for hundreds of years all work on Sunday 
was prohibited, even the necessary cooking for the 
family. There were public bakehouses to which pri- 
vate families on Saturday afternoon sent their pots 
of pork and beans, of Indian pudding, and brown 
bread, which were ready for them hot on Sunday 
morning and delivered to those who had sent them, 
and you would see a long string of callers every Sun- 
day morning at the entrance of each of the bake- 
houses. Sunday began at sundown on Saturday, and 
nothing but good books were allowed to be read by 
the children until the sun had set on Sunday after- 
noon. 

We had one great political excitement, the first in 
which I took an interest at the premature age of 
eight, having been born in the administration of An- 
drew Jackson, in his second term, and survived that of 
Martin Van Buren, which embraced the almost fatal 
panic of 1837. The nomination of "Tippecanoe and 
Tyler too," William Henry Harrison and John Tyler 
for President and Vice-President, excited the en- 
thusiasm of all of us boys, which was brought to a 
white heat when a huge log cabin was erected, with a 



[6o] 

hard-cider barrel in the rear and a Uve coon at the 
front door, where the constant meetings of this cam- 
paign were held. I think nearly all the people of 
Salem who had suffered from the hard times were for 
the Whig ticket and were strongly tempted by the 
cry of **Two dollars a day and roast beef," which was 
the catchword of that campaign. All the distin- 
guished orators of the country came to speak, among 
whom I remember notably Tom Corwin, of Ohio, 
who, after a life of great distinction, afterwards voted 
against supplies for the army during the Mexican 
War and came to an end of his political career. In 
the election of our candidates there was great uni- 
versal exultation until, a month after his inaugura- 
tion, President Harrison died, and John Tyler turned 
traitor to his party and led the democracy. I well re- 
member attending the funeral ceremonies of Presi- 
dent Harrison and listening to a eulogy of the de- 
ceased President on Salem common with a crape band 
on my arm nearly a foot wide, and while I was listen- 
ing this band was snatched away by some under- 
serving Democrat, and I went home in tears, whether 
more for the President or the lost band I cannot at 
this distance of time state. 

I have said that we were not much given to sport, 
or not at all, but I must make one exception. We 
played cards a great deal. Father had a theory that 
if he taught us all the games of cards that he knew or 
could learn himself, there was no danger of any of the 
children taking to gambling when they grew up, and 



[6.] 

SO it proved. There was not a well-known game of 
cards that we were not taught, and the result was just 
as he had calculated. This, I think, would be a very 
wise example to follow in every family, especially in 
these days of auction bridge, which is, I believe, do- 
ing much mischief in many a community. It oper- 
ated just as well as his theory about work did, that 
if he established a habit of regular work among the 
children they would become lovers of work for its own 
sake when they grew up, and so again it proved. 
Nothing could be more simple, wholesome, and 
healthy than our bringing up was, and we all had 
abundant reason to be grateful for it in our subse- 
quent life. 

Our family at Salem consisted not only of the four 
brothers, of whom I have already said so much, but 
we had two sisters, Elizabeth and Caroline, one older 
and one younger than myself, who, like their mother, 
proved to be women of sterling character and of the 
highest ideals. Elizabeth was born in September, 
1829, nearly two years and a half before me. They 
were both very important members of our family. 
Beyond the public schools at that time there was no 
provision for the higher education of women. Col- 
leges for women had not yet been thought of, and the 
only recourse was to select private schools for girls, 
with which Salem for two or three generations had 
been richly provided. In my mother's time there was 
a very celebrated teacher of very high grade named 
Thomas Cole, to whom the daughters of all the lead- 



[62] 

ing families of Salem were sent and reared with great 
success. He turned them out well-educated and ac- 
complished women, and was very much assisted, as I 
believe, by Professor Louvrier, who at the same time 
trained them in foreign languages, and they were fol- 
lowed in subsequent years by a very famous school, 
kept by Miss Ward, to whom my sisters, with other 
choice girls of that period, were intrusted with the 
same success. 

Elizabeth was a girl of really fine genius, to whom 
the acquisition of knowledge came easily by nature. 
She also came to be a very excellent musician, and 
was a very bright feature of the family, warm-hearted 
and most devoted to the rest of us. When she came 
of age, in 1850, there was every prospect of a brilliant 
career for her, and she aspired to follow the example 
of Miss Ward, whose reputation was exceedingly high, 
and become herself a teacher. For a short time she 
did assist General Henry K. Oliver, with whom she 
had been a pupil, in his classes, but, unfortunately, to 
the great distress of the family, she within a very few 
years showed symptoms of that insidious disease, 
tuberculosis, of which at that time the medical fac- 
ulty had very little control, and it seemed to be taken 
for granted that the disease must take its course and 
that a fatal result, sooner or later, was inevitable. 
Every effort was made to resist the progress of her 
trouble by long summers in the country in the hope 
that the fresh-air cure would benefit her, as it un- 
doubtedly did for a while, but at the age of thirty we 



[63] 

met with an infinite loss in her death, which caused 
the first break in our family circle, and which was 
sadly deplored by us all. Strange to say, my mother, 
who lived to be such a noble pillar of health and 
strength, lost her elder sister at about the same age 
and from the same hopeless malady. In both in- 
stances the surviving sister and all the brothers were 
wholly free from any manifestations of the infirmity, 
and were lifelong models of robust health. 

My sister Caroline, who was nearly three years 
younger than I and was very charming and hand- 
some, was educated in the same way as her elder 
sister, and was much beloved and admired, not only 
in her own family but by every one who met her. At 
the age of twenty-six she married a charming Ger- 
man, Doctor Ernst Bruno de Gersdorff^, who had 
settled in Salem as a practising physician some ten 
years before, and he also had become a very great 
favorite among Salem's best people. He was born 
at Eisenach in the Duchy of Saxe- Weimar in the year 
1825, and was very highly educated and accomplished 
before he came to this country. His father was for 
many years chief justice of the Duchy of Saxe- 
Weimar, and moved in that wonderful circle of learn- 
ing and culture of which Goethe had been recognized 
leader, and as the young de Gersdorff was twelve 
years old before the death of Goethe he must have 
been deeply affected and influenced by the wonderful 
impression which that great poet and philosopher 
made upon the community in which he lived, and to 



[64] 

which youthful minds were so receptive and suscep- 
tible. When the stirring times of 1848 came on in 
Europe and the revolutionary spirit broke out in Ger- 
many, which captivated and involved so many young 
men, de Gersdorff's elder brother was mixed up with 
some transactions which excited the attention and 
censure of the government, and he had to leave Ger- 
many. As the suspicion of complicity was supposed 
to have extended to the younger brother also, his 
father thought best that he should come to America, 
and he accompanied his younger son to this country, 
where he settled, as I have said, at Salem. He was 
full of sentiment, poetical, musical, and devoted to 
all high accomplishments. He was devoted to art, 
and was himself no mean artist. After a long and 
useful life, for a while in Salem and afterwards in 
Boston, he died in 1883. He was of the same type as 
Carl Schurz, Doctor Jacobi, and other famous Ger- 
man exiles for freedom, and had the same German cul- 
ture of Goethe's day, a genial and estimable and 
highly accomplished gentleman, and left a delightful 
memory among the people of all classes without dis- 
tinction of medical schools. His father had been, I be- 
lieve, an intimate friend of Hahnemann, the famous 
founder of homoeopathy, and he had been brought 
up as a follower of that leader. He had been educated 
at Jena and Leipsic, and, of course, was all ready for 
the practice of his profession when he arrived in 
America. 

Mrs. de Gersdorff was a most devoted and always 



[65] 

anxious mother, and at the early age of fifty-five she 
fell a victim of her own solicitude. One of her sons 
had been operated upon at Saint Luke's Hospital, in 
New York, and she insisted, against the protest of her 
friends, in taking a room at the hospital to watch his 
recovery, where she took cold and died in a very few 
days of pneumonia. She had a splendid constitution 
and ought, like her mother, to have lived to a very 
ripe old age. She is still remembered by many sur- 
viving friends, to whom she had greatly endeared 
herself. She left two sons, who graduated at Harvard 
in 1887 and 1888, and who hold well-recognized 
positions in New York. 



V 
HARVARD COLLEGE 

We were taught to look forward to graduation at 
Harvard as the only possible way of entering upon 
active life, and my first visit to that renowned seat of 
learning was at the commencement in 1846, when my 
oldest brother graduated, and I drove up with Thomas 
Drew, a famous caterer in Salem, who carried a 
wagon-load of table furniture and supplies for the 
simple spread of that day. In the church as the ex- 
ercises proceeded I saw a distinguished-looking man 
on the front of the platform with a shiny, pointed, and 
very bald head, and when I asked who that was, it 
proved to be ex-President John Quincy Adams, who 
was the earliest President of the United States whom 
I ever saw, and as he had been the sixth President it 
seemed to carry us a very great way back. 

My brother William and I were always together at 
school as long as I can remember, for some early ill- 
ness had retarded his progress at the start, and we 
went up for our examinations at last in the summer of 
1848, and now as I am writing all but five of those 
who had then graduated at that ancient university 
have passed away. The examinations for entrance at 
that date were not formidable, although they cov- 

[66] 



DOCTOR GEORGE CHOATE— 1796-1880. 
Father of J. H. C. This portrait was made when he was about sixty-six years old. 



.o83i-n5^'CI— aTAOHO 30^030 HO'SpOa 



[67] 

ered, I believe, a portion of two succeeding days, and 
were partly oral and partly in writing. At the close 
of the second day the list was read off of those who 
had successfully passed the examinations in the order 
of the marks they had received, and I was quite sur- 
prised to find my name led all the rest, but William, 
who was a far better scholar, soon took the lead and 
held it without any mishap for the whole four years* 
course. 

The transition from the narrow and limited life of 
our boyhood to the broader and freer life at Harvard at 
the age of sixteen was quite a startling one. We were 
now comparatively our own masters, and, subject to 
the rules and requirements of the college, could do as 
we pleased, and our eyes opened wide to see what our 
new freedom really meant. The routine of our phys- 
ical lives was new and most interesting. Athletics as 
yet were practically unknown, although there was, if 
I rightly recollect, a small gymnasium already upon 
the Delta, where those who wished could exercise 
every day, but if there was one thing that I hated 
then and always afterwards more than another it was 
practising in the gymnasium, and so I had little to do 
with that. Boston, four miles away, was the great at- 
traction, with all its historical associations and places 
to visit. I do not recollect ever having been there 
more than twice or even outside the bounds of Essex 
County before I entered Harvard, and as there was 
no conveyance to Boston but the omnibus we almost 
always walked. Walking I have always found to be 



[68] 

very nearly the best exercise for health and recrea- 
tion that anybody could take. 

There had been, I believe, a boat club in existence 
in previous years, but as the members committed 
some excesses after rowing into Boston to the theatre 
the club was suppressed with a strong hand by Presi- 
dent Everett, and was not renewed until Charles W. 
Eliot, of the class after mine, with his splendid phys- 
ical vigor, succeeded in reviving it. Football was not 
unknown, but it was limited in our time to a single 
game on the first Monday of the year between the 
freshmen and sophomores, and consisted simply of 
seeing which could force the ball beyond the goal of 
the other side, without any of the modern devices or 
contrivances which have brought the game to such 
perfection under the leadership of Percy Haughton as 
trainer. There was an attempt, also, to introduce 
the game of cricket, which had had such distinction 
always in England, but this also came to nothing. 

The walks to Boston and a daily walk to Mount 
Auburn, with an occasional excursion farther afield, 
suflficed to keep us in good condition. I took what I 
thought one very long walk in these excursions 
abroad. One hot summer night, near the close of the 
term, in early June, I was walking with my friend 
and classmate David Cheever, afterwards the cele- 
brated surgeon in Boston, and we got out on the 
turnpike to a sign that said, "Cambridge two miles 
and a half; Concord twelve miles and a half," and in 
a rash moment I said to him: "Cheever, I will stump 



[69] 

you to walk to Concord." "All right,'* he said, and 
as it was my challenge I could not very well back out, 
and we walked on. We got up to Concord, having 
lost our way in going through Lexington, some time 
after midnight, I could not say exactly when, and 
being slightly fatigued we stopped at the hotel and 
asked for a glass of whiskey or brandy, but it was in 
the days of the Maine law, and the landlord said that 
it was an absolute impossibility, however we pressed 
our claim and told him that we had got to get back to 
the college for morning prayers at six o'clock. He 
finally yielded and said, "Come with me," and gave 
us a delightful illustration of how the Maine law was 
executed. He led us through a labyrinth of cellars, 
up against what appeared to be a blank wall, but he 
touched a spring and a door opened, and inside was 
found a barrel with a board across it, a pitcher of 
water, a bowl of sugar, and bottles of whiskey and 
brandy, and we took a very refreshing drink. After a 
tramp of somewhat over thirty miles, as we reckoned 
it, we got back to morning prayers just as the bell 
was ringing, and after that we got breakfast and 
slept for the rest of the day. 

I always regretted that the Harvard Washington 
Corps, which had been in existence in my father's 
time in college and had given its members a good deal 
of military training, had long before been abandoned. 
How much better it would have been for us all if it 
had maintained its healthful and inspiring existence 
until now ! 



[70] 

Our first year was the last year of the college com- 
mons, which down to that time had been maintain- 
ing a somewhat precarious existence, and at the end 
of our freshman year was abandoned forever. It 
was quite exciting, however, for us to find ourselves 
for the first time taking all our meals with a large 
number of our fellow collegians, although the fare was 
very moderate. The tables were spread in the base- 
ment of University Hall, the building in which at 
that time almost all the college exercises of every kind 
were conducted, for it held not only the dining-rooms 
but the chapel, and nearly all the recitation and lec- 
ture rooms. The commons were divided into two 
branches, one at what now seems the moderate price 
of two dollars and fifty cents a week, and the other, 
where we had meat one day and pudding the next, 
and which was, therefore, commonly called "Star- 
vation Hollow," at two dollars a week, but my 
brother William and I and several of our classmates 
from Salem of equally moderate financial ability ate 
in *' Starvation Hollow," and found it quite whole- 
some and sufficient. 

The necessary expenses in our first year were mod- 
erate enough to startle any modern members of the 
university as compared with the present schedule. 
The tuition was seventy-five dollars a year, and all 
it cost William and myself, who always roomed to- 
gether, for room rent during our whole four years at 
Harvard was ninety dollars, which happened in this 
way. The first year we roomed in Holworthy, and 



[71] 

our apartment seemed to us to be royal, for there was 
a parlor, very simply but comfortably furnished, of 
course at our expense, and two bedrooms, and the 
only service we had or thought of was that of the 
"goody," so-called, who came every day to make the 
beds and clear up the rooms. The freshman year 
we were what was called *' Tutor's Freshmen," that 
is to say, Francis J. Child, that famous scholar, who 
had just returned from abroad and had been made 
tutor in English, was the parietal officer in the middle 
entry of Holworthy, and had the best room on the 
second floor, and we were his freshmen and subject 
to his call at any time, but the only call that I can 
remember during that year that he made upon us 
was a single summons to a student to whom he wished 
to administer admonition, and for this service we had 
our rooms free. 

The next year we roomed in HoUis, where we had 
a single room together, of reasonably large dimen- 
sions. The third year in Stoughton, where we were 
similarly accommodated, and the fourth year as 
seniors again we got into the third story of Hol- 
worthy in the east entry, and paid for each of these 
years the same rent of thirty dollars, fifteen dollars 
apiece, rooms that I think now rent for many times 
that amount. But the college then was not so much 
in need of money, and treated the rooms in the vari- 
ous dormitories, as they had been intended to be 
treated by their munificent donors fifty or one hun- 
dred years before, as the practically free homes of 



[72] 

the students whom they housed. To maintain a fair 
equity the dean or steward, who had the distribu- 
tion of the rooms from year to year, assigned those 
who had the poor rooms, as we had had in the junior 
and sophomore years, to the better rooms in the 
senior year, thus bringing us back to Holworthy. 

Our dress did not differ substantially from what 
we had been accustomed to, except that by the col- 
lege statute, which had been in existence probably 
from the beginning, each student was required to 
have for Sundays and exhibitions "a black coat with 
buttons of the same." 

Our first president, who signed our admittatur after 
six months probation, as the rule then was, was no 
less a person that the very distinguished orator and 
statesman Edward Everett, who as a scholar also 
had had a very remarkable career. I do not agree 
with those who seek from time to time to belittle this 
great and distinguished man. He had entered Har- 
vard, I believe, at the age of thirteen, graduated at 
seventeen at the head of his class, had been pastor 
of the Brattle Street church at Boston at the age of 
nineteen, had followed that up with deep study 
abroad for several years, and then became in turn 
tutor and professor at the college, and had been a 
member of Congress, senator, secretary of state of 
the United States, United States minister to Great 
Britain, and governor of Massachusetts, and was one 
of the best-informed scholars of his time and the 
great orator of the day. Somehow or other, with all 



[73] 

that, he was not well suited to be president of the 
university, and only held the office for three years, 
retiring on the ist of February, 1849, when he was 
succeeded by the Reverend Jared Sparks, author of 
the "Life of Washington," who held the office for 
four years. In the latter part of his time he became 
disabled, and the office was filled by that great man, 
the Reverend Doctor James Walker, so that our col- 
lege papers were signed by three successive presi- 
dents. 

I always regarded Jared Sparks as the model presi- 
dent of the college of that day, and his three years 
were truly a halcyon period for the students. He 
took no trouble about them himself, and did not 
allow anybody else to trouble them, and when com- 
plaint was made of misconduct his usual mode of 
treating it was to say: "Oh, let the boys alone. 
They'll take perfectly good care of themselves." 
And so it proved; but I suppose that according to 
the standard of an Eliot or a Lowell, especially in 
later years, the brief terms of Everett and Sparks 
would be regarded as singularly inefficient. 

Mr. Everett was noted for his extreme formality 
and the great dignity which he maintained, far out 
of the reach of the students. I had hardly been at 
college a week when I was greatly alarmed at re- 
ceiving a summons to come to the office of the presi- 
dent's secretary. I went at the time appointed with 
fear and trembling, fear that I had committed some 
unpardonable offense, and trembling lest I should be 



[74] 
dismissed, and this conversation took place: "Mr. 
Choate, the president observed with great regret that 
you passed him in Harvard Square yesterday with- 
out touching your hat. He hopes that this offense 
will never again be repeated." It never was, but 
no punishment was inflicted, because down at Salem 
hat-touching was not very common and the formali- 
ties of life were not very strictly observed; but it is 
an illustration of his relation to the students, very 
different from that of Jared Sparks, who was always 
very glad to see us and never put himself out of 
the way to trouble us, or that of President Eliot in 
later years, who stalked through the College Yard 
without taking notice of anybody, and apparently 
hoping that nobody would take notice of him, and 
really a stranger to most of the students. 

There were several great public events that hap- 
pened while I was in college : the arrival of Professor 
Louis Agassiz, the renowned naturalist, and his em- 
ployment as professor and lecturer in the college; 
the introduction of Cochituate water into Boston; 
the arrival of Louis Kossuth, and the election of 
Taylor and Fillmore as President and Vice-President 
of the United States. At any rate they were re- 
garded by us students as very great events, because 
we had never been witnesses of anything so important 
before. 

I have always believed that the accession of every 
man of great genius to the teaching force of the uni- 
versity is the most important thing that can happen 



[75] 
to it, and that by the prestige of his great name and 
reputation he does more for the college than almost 
anything else can do. Exchange professors had not 
been thought of at that time, and to get the man 
who was certainly one of the most noted naturalists 
in the world into our academic body was of truly 
unique importance. We listened to Agassiz's lec- 
tures with the profoundest attention, and he did 
much to expand our minds and thoughts. 

How the people of Boston with its then rapid 
growth ever got along without pure water it is not 
easy to conceive, and it is no wonder that all the 
civic bodies in and around Boston took part in the 
celebration. I remember that the whole student 
body joined in the great procession, which marched 
through Boston, to celebrate the event of the intro- 
duction of Cochituate water, and as I was made 
marshal of my class with Russell Sturgis I naturally 
attributed tenfold consequence to the occasion. As 
Boston has grown its water-supply that then began 
has grown steadily with it, and now comes from many 
sources and reservoirs that decorate a large tract of 
country to the west. 

The election of Taylor was one of the immediate 
results of the Mexican War, in which he had won 
great distinction, but he was probably as unfitted 
for the presidency as General Harrison, whom I had 
assisted in electing as a boy of eight in 1840. His 
nomination had been declared by Mr. Webster, who 
should have had it, as one not fit to be made, but 



[76] 

as he advised his friends, nevertheless, to vote for 
Taylor as a safer alternative than the Democratic 
candidate, we all joined in celebrating the prospect 
of his election. I remember marching in a torch- 
light procession the whole length of Boston to the 
Roxbury line, where, seeing a vacant lot, I made 
haste to throw my torch into it and returned to 
Cambridge quite satisfied with my part. 

Then in the midst of my college career came the 
great compromises of 1850, sustained by Webster, 
Clay, and Calhoun, which we foolishly thought had 
settled the slavery question forever, although within 
four years they were ripped to pieces, and the great 
events that followed led rapidly to the election of 
Lincoln. The utter collapse of these compromises 
so quickly after they were made, although they were 
thought at that time to be of the greatest historical 
importance, shows how unreliable is the judgment 
of old leaders, who have outlived their best powers 
and have no appreciation of the direction which the 
nation's progress is taking. Clay and Calhoun both 
went to their graves in 1850, and Webster followed 
them two years afterwards, on the 24th of October, 
1852. 

The reaction of public opinion was instantaneous 
and almost universal. The great New England 
statesman's 7th of March speech, in which he took 
the ground that it was not necessary to re-enact the 
prohibition of slavery in regions from which, as he 
contended, the laws of nature and of climate had 



[77] 

made its existence impracticable, was a great dis- 
appointment to the mass of the people at the North 
and was construed by them as a bid for the presi- 
dency in the next federal election, and as an aban- 
donment of the splendid position that he had pre- 
viously occupied as the representative of New 
England sentiment and a lifelong advocate of the 
restriction of slavery, so far as the Constitution 
would permit. The doors of Faneuil Hall, that his- 
toric cradle of liberty, were closed against his friends, 
who wished to do him honor by a reception there, a 
very stupid blunder, for they took to the streets and, 
erecting a great platform in front of the Revere 
House, they received him on his return from Wash- 
ington with unbounded enthusiasm and applause. 
I was present on that occasion, for I had no sym- 
pathy with those who would denounce and destroy 
him after his wonderful record in the past, and it 
was a great satisfaction to hear the brief address of 
welcome, which was pronounced by Judge Benjamin 
R. Curtis, and Webster's reply. He was still a mag- 
nificent specimen of manhood and a noble orator, 
and as we listened to him we could not but think 
of the immense services which he had rendered to 
the country; especially how for two entire genera- 
tions he had done all that one man could possibly do 
to arouse in the hearts of the young men of the 
nation an intense spirit of nationality and an undy- 
ing devotion to the great cause of liberty and union. 
This service did not and could not die with him and 



[78] 

counted largely, ten years afterwards, in the grand 
uprising of the North for the defense of the national 
existence and honor when the rebel assault upon 
Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of our 
terrible Civil War. 

The other event to which I have referred, the ar- 
rival of Louis Kossuth, in 1849, was an event of sur- 
passing interest to all the people of America. We 
had sympathized with the splendid struggle for free- 
dom which he had so valiantly maintained, just as 
we are sympathizing to-day with the great struggle 
of the Entente nations for the overthrow of the same 
destructive militarism which succeeded then in 
crushing this great champion of freedom, just as it 
is now seeking, but without success, to dominate the 
entire world. 

I remember that we were having one of our semi- 
annual exhibitions, as they were called, in the chapel, 
in University Hall, on the day when Kossuth ar- 
rived in Cambridge at the invitation of the authori- 
ties of the university. These college exhibitions 
usually consisted of addresses or the recitation of 
parts, by meritorious students, and took place semi- 
annually as rewards of merit. I happened to be 
upon the programme but had finished my part when 
Kossuth arrived and was ushered into the chapel by 
a committee of citizens, and delivered an address in 
as perfect English as I have ever heard from any 
English or American orator. As he had acquired this 
knowledge of our tongue while a prisoner in an Aus- 



MRS. GEORGE CHOATE. 

Born at Salem, 1805; died at Stockbridge, Mass., 1887. Mother of J. H. C. Margaret 
Manning Hodges, daughter of Gamaliel and Sarah Williams Hodges, married 
Doctor Choate in 1825. Their married life lasted fifty-six years and a half, and 
they had four sons and two daughters. J. H. C. was the fifth child. 



rotirited h ten^ards, 

uprising of the North tor the defense oi 
nd honor when the rebel 

. ,_ Civil "v. :..- 

The other event to wh^^h I have referred, the ar- 
rival of Louis Kossuti j-Q, was an event of sur- 
passing interest t e people of America. We 
liad sympathized Wicli tiie splendid struggle for free- 
dom which he had so valiantly maintained, just as 
we are sympathizing to-day with the ?rent struggle 
oi the Entente nations for the overt the same 
d est rue ceded 



happened 

;; .v,4iuc-ft)iji3ai,5?«?*art when ^ 




cvcf ne:ird irom any 
As he had ?r<ii!ired this 
Longui prisor 



[79] 

trian dungeon, after the collapse of his great enter- 
prise, we were lost in wonder at the readiness of the 
faculty by which he had acquired such complete 
knowledge of a new language. 

I have seen it several times repeated that on his 
sudden advent into the chapel I was delivering my 
part, and that having been brushed aside by his en- 
try, I in some way addressed him after his speech 
with a tribute of admiration. It was only yesterday 
(November 27th, 1916) that I read in the personal 
recollections just published by one of my contem- 
poraries at Harvard, this extraordinary statement, 
that during the interruption caused by his entrance 
and address, I ''seated on the stage formed a Latin 
period containing a graceful reference to the guest's 
career, and on arising to resume my part, opened 
with the extemporaneous compliment in Latin, which 
brought the Magyar orator again to his feet and, 
amidst a new explosion of applause, Kossuth replied 
in faultless Latin, speaking as though it were his 
native tongue. Nothing could have been finer.'* 
This was a pure outbreak of my friend's imagination. 
I had absolutely nothing to do with it, for Addison 
Brown, who afterwards was our much-admired ad- 
miralty judge in New York for twenty-five years, was 
on the platform when Kossuth entered, and no ad- 
dress or reference to him was made, as the programme 
proceeded, except a few words of reception by the 
president of the university, but it only shows how 
dangerous it is for men in the ninth decade to write 



[8o] 

and publish reminiscences, which, up to this time, 
I have always tried to avoid. 

Harvard College at the time I entered it was a 
comparatively small affair, and as provincial and 
local as could well be imagined, and the idea of its 
ever becoming the great national university had, I 
think, never entered into anybody's head. The stu- 
dents in my first year numbered only 549, including 
all the professional schools, there being theological 
students, 19; law students, 96; medical students, 
139; special students in chemistry and mathematics, 
and citizens attending lectures in scientific school, 
16; and resident graduates, 6, amounting together 
to 276; and the undergraduates being divided be- 
tween seniors, 75; juniors, 58; sophomores, 68; and 
freshmen, 72, amounting in all to 273; the whole 
comparing strangely with modern years, when a single 
graduating class has numbered over 500, or nearly 
twice as many as the entire body of undergraduates 
at that early period, and the growth of the profes- 
sional and graduate departments has increased pro- 
portionally. 

My own class and all the classes of that time were 
composed chiefly of New England boys, a very few 
coming from New York, and about an equal number 
from the South, whose people of wealth had long 
been in the habit of sending their boys to Harvard. 
I call it provincial and local because its scope and 
outlook hardly extended beyond the boundaries of 
New England. Besides which it was very denomina- 



[8.] 

tional, being held exclusively in the hands of Uni- 
tarians. The president and all the fellows constitut- 
ing the corporation were Unitarians, a majority of 
the overseers were Unitarians, and I think that a 
majority of the officers of instruction and govern- 
ment were of the same faith. This caused it to be 
looked upon askance by the rest of the United States, 
where that faith had not extended far, and they hesi- 
tated to send their sons to Harvard for fear of what 
they called its heretical tendencies. It is true that 
at that time the people of Massachusetts were largely 
of that faith, and the clergy of that body in that 
commonwealth far exceeded in intellectual and per- 
sonal force those of all the other denominations. 
There was a freshman, when I was a senior, who was 
destined to exercise tremendous influence in breaking 
down these narrow barriers and vastly broadening 
the character and the influence of the college. I 
mean Bishop Phillips Brooks, of the class of '55, 
whom I remember perfectly well as a freshman, a 
tall and slender stripling overtopping the rest of his 
class, in a distant corner of the chapel, and I followed 
his course with admiration and enthusiasm until, 
with other men of similar liberal tendencies, he had 
made the college entirely undenominational and 
opened its doors, its curriculum, and its associations 
very wide, so as to admit men of all faiths, and of no 
faith, and men of all nations to be enrolled in the 
undergraduate classes. We had compulsory college 
prayers, held at the unearthly hours of seven o'clock 



[82] 

in the morning in winter, and six in the summer, and 
the rush from our beds at the sound of the bell to 
the chapel was most unseemly, but Phillips Brooks 
lived to be the instrument of removing all compul- 
sion, and made the college in a religious point of view 
absolutely free. Instead of being limited to Uni- 
tarian preachers at prayers and on Sundays, it now 
has a body of religious teachers gathered from all 
sects and faiths, and various parts of the country, 
and commands for the service the greatest ability to 
be found in all, and the annual catalogue now contains 
the names of boys of all countries and all religions, 
Christians and Jews, Asiatics, Europeans, South 
Americans, and those who have had their birth in 
the islands of the sea, and already it has contributed 
much by the education of Japanese and Chinese to 
the modernization of those ancient lands. The sug- 
gestion of such a result in my time would have been 
received as an absolute impossibility. 

Many experiments have been made and much 
improvement, undoubtedly, has been accomplished 
in the last seventy years in methods of education, 
but after all I am inclined to the belief that these 
varying methods have resulted chiefly in the better 
development of the youth of inferior and average 
capacity and ability, and that under them all the 
men of natural superiority of talents and faculty, de- 
termined to get an education and relying chiefly upon 
their own efforts for this, have risen naturally to the 
top, and subsequently taken their lead in the life of 



[83] 

their time. That is to say, take the ten classes from 
1846 to 1856, and they can furnish, as the catalogue 
shows, a group of men educated at Harvard who can 
compare favorably with the best men of any subse- 
quent decade in the history of the university. Let 
me mention a few in this older decade for whom I 
would challenge comparison with any similar num- 
ber in any later period. There were Professors Fran- 
cis James Child, George Martin Lane, and Charles 
Eliot Norton, and Senator George Frisbie Hoar, of 
the class of '46; William C. Endicott, of '47; Professor 
Cook, the great chemist, and Dean Hoffman, of '48; 
my brother, Charles Francis Choate, first scholar in 
the class of '49, and his classmate, Horace Davis, 
president of the University of California; James C. 
Carter, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, and John Noble, 
in the class of '50; Professors Dunbar, Goodwin, and 
Langdell, of '51; my brother, William Gardner 
Choate, first scholar in the class of '52, and his class- 
mates Judge Addison Brown, Doctor David Williams 
Cheever, Professor Gurney, dean and fellow of the 
university; Professors James Bradley Thayer and 
William Robert Ware; Charles William Eliot, and 
Professors Adams Sherman Hill, James Mills Peirce, 
and Justin Winsor, of the class of '53; Horace How- 
ard Furness, of the class of '54; Theodore Lyman and 
Chief Justice James Tyndale Mitchell, of the class of 
'55; and Charles Francis Adams, Governor George 
D. Robinson, and Judge Jeremiah Smith, of the class 
of '56. Take these men as examples, and where in 



[84] 

any subsequent decade can you find an equal num- 
ber to excel them, or perhaps to match with them as 
the fruit of varying systems of training and educa- 
tion, allowing always for the immense growth in the 
numbers of the classes from which selection might be 
made ? 

There was one immense advantage which the boys 
of our time at Harvard enjoyed over those of recent 
years, the classes were so small in number that we 
became intimately acquainted with each other, much 
more intimately than at any subsequent period of 
life with any similar number of acquaintances, under- 
stood one another's character perfectly, and formed 
the closest ties of friendship and a strong class-feeling 
that continued unbroken through life; while now, 
as I understand, where the classes are numbered by 
hundreds, no such state of things is possible, and very 
few members of any class know in a similar way the 
whole or even half of their associates. Groups and 
cliques of friends are formed, but there is no genuine 
class-feeling in which all unite as in the old days. I 
think, too, that there was then no such distance be- 
tween the professors and the students as now pre- 
vails. We came to know them well, and it was quite 
possible for any professor or tutor to become ac- 
quainted with and to become familiar with the men- 
tal and moral qualities of the members of each divi- 
sion of the class, for in almost all the courses the class 
was divided alphabetically into two divisions. 

No friendships of after-life begin to equal in ardor 



[85] 
and intensity those of college days, and no names 
ever become so familiar as those of the associates of 
that early period of life. I have in my bedroom the 
photographs of eighty-five of our members, all but 
three of the entire number, in all the beauty and 
freshness of youth, just as they appeared on Com- 
mencement Day in 1852, when we graduated and 
parted, never to meet again in full ranks. The cos- 
tumes of that day seem a little peculiar now, for we 
all wore long hair and high collars and huge neck- 
handkerchiefs, which long since passed out of fashion. 
I often put myself to sleep by calling the roll of my 
classmates, whose names are as familiar now as then. 
In our freshman year all the studies were required, 
consisting chiefly of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, 
which I still regard as of extremely great value in the 
training of youthful minds. Our study of the lan- 
guages was in the main limited to the correct con- 
struction of the Greek and the Latin, so as to get 
the correct and full meaning out of every sentence, 
and to do that necessarily required great concentra- 
tion and accuracy and perseverance, traits of enor- 
mous value in any subsequent pursuits, and without 
which any real success in them is hardly possible, 
but we were sadly lacking in any intelligent study 
of the glorious history and literature of Greece and 
Rome, which would have made our studies so much 
more delightful. Afterwards, with increasing free- 
dom from year to year, our programme of studies 
was made more and more liberal, and the elective 



[86] 

system began to show its effect, although not nearly 
so much as in later years, for still many subjects were 
required. A diligent student was kept pretty busy, 
for I see by the tabular view of our exercises during 
the year 1851-52 that our recitations began at eight 
in the morning and continued with more or less in- 
terruptions until six at night, and the hour of morn- 
ing prayers was at seven o'clock from September to 
April, and at six o'clock from the first Monday in 
April until Commencement; breakfast was immedi- 
ately after morning prayers, and dinner at one 
o'clock throughout the year. 

I chose for my special studies Latin and Greek 
throughout my college course, and never had occa- 
sion to regret it, for the same mental exercises that 
required perfection in those subjects stood me well 
in hand all through the rest of my life in solving prob- 
lems of law and diplomacy, or anything else that I 
had to work upon. I also found that committing to 
memory, although never required, was of infinite 
value as a mental discipline, and have always won- 
dered why it has not been more generally kept up. 
When I graduated I could repeat from memory the 
whole of the first book of Milton's *' Paradise Lost," 
and many other valuable gems of English literature, 
and I wish that I had continued it until the present 
day, for I am sure that such a habit continued through 
a long life would keep the mind well stored with the 
most precious passages of English literature of all 
times and of every variety, and would be an infinite 



/t?5». 



[87] 

solace and satisfaction. But I gave up the habit 
when I left college and became busy in what seemed 
at that time to be more important matters, and while 
much that I then learned in that way still lingers in 
my memory, the most of it has vanished, so that ex- 
cept for the few opening sentences of ** Paradise Lost " 
the only sentence that I can now recall is the one 
that I found it most difficult to commit to memory 
and fix in the gray matter of the brain, and which 
when once lodged there has never escaped: 

"From Aroer to Nebo, and the wild 
Of southmost Abarim; in Hesebon 
And Horonaim, Seons Realm, beyond 
The flowry Dale of Sibma, clad with vines. 
And Eleale to the Asphaltic Pool." 

I am sorry to say that until Mr. Lane returned 
from abroad to become tutor in Latin we had no 
first-class teaching in either that or Greek. Too 
much of our work was routine work, studying the 
texts of prescribed volumes and reciting by rote, 
and lectures at first were very scarce, indeed. I re- 
member in our freshman year only one course of 
three lectures by Professor John Ware, on the 
"Means of Preserving Health," which were very wise 
and very good; but as we progressed in later years 
we had better luck, and by the time we came to be 
juniors and seniors it was our great good fortune to 
be able to listen to lectures from Professor Channing 
on rhetoric, Longfellow on modern literature. Lover- 



[88] 

ing on electricity, Gray on botany, and, above all, 
the great Agassiz on geology. From all these we 
really felt that we were learning a great deal, but the 
most unique, critical, and delightful of all the pro- 
fessors of our time was Professor Edward Tyler Chan- 
ning, who was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and 
Oratory from 1819 to 1851, a period of thirty-two 
years, during which, as I believe, he did more to form 
what I may call the Harvard style of speech and 
writing than any other individual influence. One of 
the greatest joys of life was to attend his hours, when 
our themes and forensics, for which he had given us 
subjects two weeks before, were before him for ex- 
amination and criticism. He was a deadly foe of all 
splurging and extravagance of expression, and to all 
obscurity of language, and his criticisms were as 
piercing and caustic as they were delightful. Prun- 
ing and weeding out and sarcastic elimination were 
his great weapons, and if the Harvard men of that 
time were, as I think they were generally, given to 
clearness, force, and earnestness, he is very chiefly 
entitled to the credit of it all. 

Our examinations did not amount to much, and I 
think never did until long after we left college. We 
were pretty carefully examined on entering to test i 

our qualifications for admission, but never after that, 
that I can recall, were we subjected to any serious 
examination or to any written examinations at all. 
Every year the corporation appointed a board of ex- 
aminers in each of the subjects into which our cur- 



[89] 

riculum was divided. They were gentlemen of dis- 
tinction from various parts of the State of Massa- 
chusetts, and I think none from any other part of the 
country. They were not specially versed, as a rule, 
in the subjects on which they were appointed exam- 
iners. On the day appointed for examination some 
of them would appear in each department and have 
seats assigned them on the platform, and sit in silence 
while the professor or instructor examined us on 
something that we had recently learned. I do not 
remember any one of them ever asking any question, 
and, of course, it was not difficult to receive their 
approval and even commendation, and it never re- 
quired any examination to get out of college. Every- 
thing went by marks in those days, the accumulation 
of marks through the four years (eight, I believe) 
being the highest mark, and from there graded down 
to zero. It was well said in one of our mock parts 
that the Gospel of Mark was the guide to the scholar, 
and the declaration of Tom Whitridge, of the class 
of 'i8, of which my father was a member, that if it 
had taken as severe an examination to get out of 
college as it had to get in, he would have laid his 
bones there, continued traditional and true down to 
our time. 

We got absolutely nothing from the morning and 
evening prayers. They served merely as contri- 
vances for getting the boys out of bed in the morning 
and preventing their leaving the college before night. 
The prayer-makers did not seem to take much more 



[90] 

interest in them than the boys themselves, ahhough 
it was sometimes difficult for them to stop when they 
got under way, and the story went that at one of the 
morning prayers the minister delivered himself in 
this way: *'0 Lord, we pray thee to make the in- 
temperate temperate, the insincere sincere, and the 
industrious 'dustrious." So when Phillips Brooks 
arose in his might and insisted upon abolishing all 
requirements, it must have been a great relief to the 
college, and a blessing to all who afterwards cared 
to attend, as they did in great numbers. 

On the whole, my four years at Harvard, from 
1848 to 1852, were the best and happiest period of my 
life, as I believe that they were of most of the boys. 
We were blessed with all the spirits of youth, with 
no responsibilities, no cares, and with only the in- 
spiration of our individual ambition. Upon the 
whole. Harvard College, with its delightful memories 
and associations, its lofty and well-maintained stand- 
ards, and its ever-growing greatness and power, has 
been the best and most wholesome influence upon 
my life, from the day of graduation, when I was one 
of the youngest of her children, until to-day, when I 
stand upon the catalogue Number 14 among her 
14,000 surviving graduates, and to receive the ap- 
proval of Harvard men throughout the world has 
always been a sufficient satisfaction and reward. 



JOSEPH HODGES QiOATE AT THE AGE OF TWENTY. 

This picture was taken with his class at graduation in 1852. The original 
daguerreotype is in the Harvard Library at Cambridge. 



I 9c> j 



this way: y thee to make i 

icmpcrate temperate, the msincere sincere, and r!;e 
industrioi- nen Phillips Brooks 

; upon abolishing all 

,.<..... .. ■ ..i a great re'^-^ ••• the 

g to all who sftenv ed 

i in p^reat nui 
Ovi. tr<e w|; /ears at Harvard, from 

■ nv 



jilt) ajjlj I -ft^Sl .ni-j^oilBubs|s }« «3«^3t~«i(i 'iiliw>~,a34<^l:j^sw, fi4(J3iq aiHT 
.sgfchdtfffiU Yi'ViBl^fJ bi6vilH''9rfj m SI sVyJoa-ilaVafifc 



VI 

TRAINING FOR THE BAR 

The Law School, when I entered it in 1852, was, 
like each of the other departments of the university, 
a comparatively small affair. In our entering class 
there were only forty-seven, and the other two classes 
were of smaller numbers. What there was of teach- 
ing was done by two professors, and a university lec- 
turer. Judge Joel Parker, who had been chief justice 
of New Hampshire, and Theophilus Parsons, who 
had been a very successful lawyer in Boston, and was 
the son of the chief justice of Massachusetts of the 
same name. Judge Parker, the Royal Professor of 
Law, was an exceedingly profound and learned law- 
yer. He was so erudite and profound that we of the 
lighter minds really could not successfully follow the 
action of his, although men of sterner faculties, like 
Carter and Langdell and my two brothers, got very 
much out of him; but to me the great light of the 
Law School, while I was there, was Professor Parsons, 
a lawyer of much smaller caliber and lighter vein, 
but who, having had great experience at the bar, 
had a delightful way of giving us the general prin- 
ciples of law in a manner that made a lasting im- 
pression upon our minds, and gave me many points 
that I remembered and made use of in all my subse- 

[91] 



[92] 

quent career at the bar. The university lecturer, 
Judge Loring, probate judge in Boston, came out 
for three or four lectures a week on such subjects as 
did not come within the programme of the two pro- 
fessors. The only course of his that I can remember 
attending was on the domestic relations, and I can 
only recall that he was an exceedingly conservative 
man, and a good deal behind the age, even for that 
time. The gist of his discourse upon the marital re- 
lations may be judged from the fact of his saying re- 
peatedly the stereotype utterance: "The husband 
and wife are one, and that one is the husband." The 
standard at the school was very low at that time. 
There were absolutely no examinations to get in, or 
to proceed, or to get out. All that was required was 
the lapse of time, two years, and the payment of the 
fees, and not to have got into any disgrace while in 
the school. With that we were sure of the degree of 
Bachelor of Laws at the end of the second year. I 
see that there was a Committee on Visiting the Law 
School, consisting of very eminent lawyers and judges, 
all of Massachusetts, but I do not recall their ever 
visiting the school, individually or collectively, or 
exercising any of the powers of examiners. Our right 
to the degree consisted in having attended more or 
less of the lectures and paid our fees, as I have said. 
Nevertheless, we did learn a great deal of law. 
The library for the time was exceedingly good, and 
we formed among ourselves law clubs, in which moot 
courts were held, and cases tried and argued, and 



I 93] 

briefs prepared and submitted, the elder members 
acting as judges, and once, at the end of the year, 
there was a mock trial in which members of the junior 
class of the college were impanelled as jurors, and 
members of the graduating class, selected for the 
purpose, tried the case before them. And what was 
more, Boston was very near, where the courts were 
constantly in session, and to which we resorted freely 
for instruction and entertainment. 

It was while at the Law School that I formed a 
more intimate acquaintance with Mr. Rufus Choate, 
then at the head of the profession in Massachusetts, 
and, I should say, in the whole country, and became 
very much interested in his personality and in his 
methods. It is needless to say that he was a won- 
derful orator, but besides that he was one of the 
most fascinating personalities that I had ever known. 
To hear him in court or on the platform, or in private 
conversation was a very great treat, and he was one 
of the most affectionate and warm-hearted of men. 
In my last year in the Law School he invited me to 
go with him on a journey to the White Mountains, 
and, of course, I eagerly accepted the rare oppor- 
tunity, and in those three days I learned how fast he 
was using up his life and his powers. We started 
from his house in Boston very early on Thursday 
morning, and got back there very late on Saturday 
night. We seemed to be going at full speed all the 
time. The railroads at that date had not opened all 
the way to the Crawford House, or from there through 



[94] 

the mountains, but we took special wagons from the 
railroad terminus and went at the best speed that 
could be made, although he seemed to be very much 
afraid of horses. I remember that when we got to 
the Crawford House, late at night, it was very cold 
(and he was always oppressed by the cold), but when 
we entered the door of the hotel and saw a grand fire 
of great logs burning in the fireplace, he warmed up 
at once, and turning to me he said : ** Do you remem- 
ber that grand verse in Isaiah: *Aha, I am warm, I 
have seen the fire' ?" The mere sight of the blazing 
logs seemed to penetrate his body at once. Even 
for that short journey he carried a trunkful of books, 
as it seemed to me, in Greek, Latin, and English, and 
although there was not much time to read as we trav- 
elled, I have an impression that he overhauled them 
during the night and made much use of them. His 
conversation at all times was most edifying and en- 
joyable, full of references to delightful things that he 
had read in books, and lighted up by genuine wit and 
humor, but he really made a labor of the journey in 
endeavoring to cover such considerable distances, and 
to crowd into three days what might well have taken 
as many weeks in that era that knew nothing of rapid 
transit. When we reached Boston and got back to 
his house he said to me: "Now, that is my vacation 
for this year." It was at this rate that he had 
worked from the time he left the United States Sen- 
ate in 1845, and that he continued to work to his 
untimely end in 1859, when he was a little short of 



[95] 

sixty. He ought to have Hved to a serene old age, 
but he literally crowded into his sixty years the work 
of, at least, eighty, winning great renown, giving vast 
delight to the men and women of his own time, and 
leaving such an impress upon the age that succeeded 
him that, as Mr. Dana well said, the lawyers of 
America, when they met for mutual conversation and 
entertainment, found that they could do better by 
reminiscences of Rufus Choate than by anything that 
they could themselves present. 

It was during my time in college and at the Law 
School that the trial of the famous fugitive slave cases 
took place in Boston, upon which the eager attention 
of the whole nation was turned. The general feeling 
of the collegians and the members of the Law School 
tended to be very conservative, for we had been 
brought up, you may say, at the feet of Daniel Web- 
ster, who was chiefly responsible for the compromise 
measures of 1850, including the fugitive slave law, 
which professed to be properly devised to carry out 
the provisions of the Constitution of the United 
States, requiring the return from one State to an- 
other of persons held to service or labor. I do not 
think that, with the exception of the extreme aboli- 
tionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell 
Phillips, there was much dispute as to the necessity 
of a proper law for that purpose, if we intended to 
stand by the Constitution, but there was great ground 
for contention on the subject of the method of bring- 
ing about the return of fugitive slaves. All that the 



[96] 

Constitution said was that they should be delivered 
up, and it was well maintained by the opponents of 
the law of 1850 that that did not dispense with the 
usual safeguards and guarantees of personal freedom, 
and that, instead of being tried before a single com- 
missioner, the fugitives were entitled to a trial by 
jury, as I think they certainly were. But the statute 
had made no such provision, and so a small number of 
fugitives were surrendered and carried back by force 
to their original masters in the South. These few in 
number, however, had a very great effect in arousing 
the popular indignation, and were a very important 
factor in bringing about in a few years the overthrow 
of the whole system of slavery under the wise ad- 
ministration of Lincoln. 

During my two years at the Law School I earned, 
for the first time, my own living by preparing boys 
for entrance to Harvard, which consumed about two 
hours of each day, and in which I found great benefit 
in reviving and keeping alive my knowledge of the 
classics, and I discovered that in teaching one learned 
more than he knew before. 

After leaving the Law School, as a third year was 
required and an examination before admission to the 
bar, I was privileged to enter the office of Hodges and 
Saltonstall, in Boston, and spent a year at my father's 
home at Salem, going up every day for the purpose 
by train. Business was not then so driving among 
lawyers as it afterwards became, and a very consid- 
erable portion of my time during that year was spent 



[97] 

in attending the courts, where I learned more than 
I had learned an5rwhere else as to the trial and argu- 
ment of cases. There was almost always during the 
greater part of the year some important trial going 
on, and in this trial two or three leaders were always 
engaged. These were Rufus Choate, Sidney Bart- 
lett, and Charles G. Loring. It is needless to say 
that the trials in the Supreme Court were conducted 
with the greatest dignity and decorum, and nothing 
could be more instructive to a student of the law 
than to sit in the presence of such a tribunal and 
listen to the trial and argument of cases by three 
such eminent men. They were nearly the same age, 
but their styles were very different. 

Mr. Choate's exuberant eloquence, with a mind 
richly stored with a vast wealth of reading and knowl- 
edge, and an unbounded human sympathy, made 
him, I think, the greatest advocate that America has 
ever known. In the argument of questions of law 
he was a very close reasoner, with a rich gift of illus- 
tration, so that it was almost impossible for him to 
lose a case that could by any possibility have been 
won; but it was his fascinating personality that car- 
ried all before him with the jury. He never over- 
looked a fact or an incident that could by any possi- 
bility aid his side of the case, and would form a 
theory upon the facts presented which would com- 
mend itself to his conscience and judgment, and win, 
if it was possible to win, the approval of the jury. 
His patience, tenacity of purpose, and exceeding good 



[98] 
humor would carry the day over any ordinary ad- 
versary. He would not only address the jury as a 
whole body, but would fasten upon each individual 
juryman in turn, of whose sympathy he was not al- 
ready sure, and stick to him until he had mastered 
him, so that I have no doubt he occasionally won a 
verdict which any other man would have lost, and 
which, perhaps, he ought to have lost, although from 
a long experience in jury trials I am satisfied that in 
nine cases out of ten the jury decide right upon the 
evidence, whoever tries the case. 

Mr. Bartlett was as unlike Mr. Choate as one man 
could possibly differ from another. Cold and sharp, 
and glittering as steel, he would push aside all that 
the fancy and imagination of his adversary had 
brought into the case, and hold the courts to the 
main point, and the jury to one or two cardinal facts, 
which would compel them, if the case made it pos- 
sible, to find a verdict for his side. He was very 
learned, too, but had never, I believe, been such a 
student as his more celebrated adversary, and he had 
the rare advantage (I say rare to a great lawyer) of 
extraordinary business experience and faculties, and 
an extreme common sense, which, after all, is the 
thing which ought to govern both courts and juries. 
With a vast business always on hand, he never wore 
himself out by travelling on his nerves, to die at fifty- 
nine, as his chief opponent did, but lived a long, use- 
ful, and happy life in the very front rank of the pro- 
fession, and after arguing an important case in the 



RUFUS CHOATE. 

Born at Hog Island, 1799; died at Halifax, 1859. First cousin of Doctor George 
Choate This was J. H. C.'s favorite portrait of his distinguished kinsman, and 
always 'hung in his own room over his bed. He had a great admiration and af- 
fection for Rufus Choate. and always felt deeply grateful to him for his early 
kindnesses. 



\arymzn in turn, of whos'^ thy he was nc^ 

d he had mas 



nilthot^ 
g expenence ii tied th 

nine cas le jury de .at upon the 

' case. 

■ir. i^hcaic as ■ 



i'. .: on his nervev 

nme,as^hv< cmti omKntrpt a^g^ mtt Sivep aumy;, us 

sgioSO ioJ:oU lo nieuoD-'Jrtil .Qiai .retiUHjB bsib ;9eti .Bneigl aoH Jjf'moa 

:•. fcns noft/iiiinhE jBsig £ Lsif sH bad ?if} isvo mcxn nv/d aiil ni'gniiil e'tEwli 
/iifi-j aid i-.l mil! o! lul-jj.'.;g xiqssb 3!>'. ?xcv<iE bi:>; ,3J6p4D. iu'luK lu} /lobsai 

.ROZ'.^nbniJ 



[99] 

Supreme Court at Washington at the age of ninety, 
went home and died of old age. 

Mr. Loring was wholly unlike either of the other 
two great protagonists at the Boston bar. He com- 
manded the confidence of the whole community by 
his great weight of character. He, also, had great 
business ability and experience, and was always mas- 
ter of his case, so that when he spoke to court or 
juries they not only believed every word he said, but 
received it with open minds, ready to be convinced. 
There was never any nonsense about him. Indeed, 
there was a total want of the sense of humor, 
and he proved always to be a most formidable an- 
tagonist. 

No theatre that I have ever attended offered so 
great an intellectual treat as to sit at the feet of these 
three great masters of the law, and listen to them 
from beginning to end of a great argument or trial. 
It is a wonderful thing for a law school to be in close 
proximity to a great city, where the students can see 
and hear justice administered according to the high- 
est and best standards, in courts presided over by 
learned judges, appointed for life by the chief execu- 
tive, as up to this day has been the case in Massa- 
chusetts, and has secured for the people of that 
State, at any rate, a government of laws and not of 
men. 

The office of Hodges and Saltonstall, in which I 
spent a year from October, 1854, to October, 1855, 
was a most agreeable one. Mr. Hodges was highly 



[ lOO] 

skilled in all the departments of the law, but was at 
that time somewhat out of health, so that we did 
not see him constantly, but Leverett Saltonstall was 
one of the most charming, honorable, and high-toned 
men that I have ever known. He was justly proud 
of his most distinguished ancestry, running far back 
to colonial days, and first represented on the Har- 
vard College catalogue by Doctor Henry Saltonstall 
in the first class of 1642, who received his medical 
degree at Padua in 1649, and became a Fellow of 
New College, Oxford, in 1650. He was of a high- 
strung and nervous temperament, which made the 
trial of causes (in which, if he had continued in them, 
he would have had great success) a very severe strain 
upon him, although then he was very young at the 
bar, but it was a great privilege to be associated and 
in daily contact with him, and I have always looked 
back upon that year's experience with him with the 
greatest satisfaction. 

It was while with him that I had my first case and 
earned my first fee, which has always aff^orded me 
great pleasure to recall. We were sitting in the 
oflftce together, one cold winter's day, when two 
rugged farmers from Vermont came in with a case, 
which they briefly stated to Saltonstall. They had 
each had a carload of potatoes come down by rail- 
road from Vermont, and they were found to be com- 
pletely frozen on arrival, and the farmers had brought 
an action against the railroad company for the value 
of the potatoes so destroyed. The question was 



[lOl] 

whether it was by the act of God or by the neghgence 
of the railroad company that they had been frozen. 
Certainly the act of God was the immediate cause in 
creating or permitting the extreme frost, but behind 
that was the negligence of the railroad company, 
which should have protected the potatoes more per- 
fectly. It was rather a small affair, and Mr. Salton- 
stall hardly thought the case was up to his personal 
position and rank at the bar, but he turned them 
over to me, saying: "Here is Choate. Perhaps he 
will take it." As I had never had a case I was very 
glad to do so. It seemed that the evidence was to 
be taken before a commissioner in Boston on the 
second day after, which would give an intervening 
day for preparation, and I very gladly undertook the 
job. It so happened that Mr. Rufus Choate at that 
time was laid up with a lame knee, but was driving 
out every day, and on the following day he happened 
to call at the office for me to drive with him through 
Brookline, and so we spent an hour together and I 
told him about my first case. He was very much 
delighted at the idea, and gave me quite a lot of ad- 
vice about cross-examination of witnesses, in which 
he was a wonderful adept, so that I went the next 
day with the two farmers before the commissioner 
and spent the whole day in taking the evidence, 
which I thought would enable them to establish suc- 
cessfully the proposition before a country jury, at 
any rate, that the loss of the potatoes was wholly 
due to the negligence of the railroad company, and 



[ I02 ] 

that the act of God had nothing to do with it. On 
our return to the office the farmers raised the ques- 
tion of my fee — what it would be. Well, I had never 
had a fee, and I had no means of ascertaining the 
value of my services, which I thought were consid- 
erable, and I said to them: "Well, it has taken all 
day. It seems to be a matter of some importance 
to you. I wish to be entirely reasonable, and I 
should think that three dollars would be about 
right." 

"Well," they said, "we talked that matter over 
on the way down from Vermont, and we kinder 
thought that there were two cases, two carloads of 
potatoes, and that a dollar a case, a dollar a load, 
would be about right." Not wishing to have a con- 
test over my first fee, I gladly accepted it, and they 
handed me two of the little gold dollars that were 
current at that time. One of them I gave to my 
friend and classmate, Darwin Erastus Ware, who, 
like myself, had never had a fee, and I must have 
spent the other, but the romance of it was that forty- 
five years afterwards, after Ware had died, his widow, 
looking over his papers, found something wrapped 
up in paper, and marked on the outside, "Half of 
Joe Choate's first fee," which she very kindly sent 
to my daughter, who has since worn it as a charm 
upon her watch-guard. But this, my first experience 
in fees, taught me to be forever after very moderate 
in all that matter. 

After going through with the usual examination 



[ I03] 
for admission I was enrolled in the Massachusetts 
bar in October, 1855, and although I have never 
practised in that State, I have always regarded it as 
a great privilege from that day to this to have been 
a member of the Massachusetts bar. 

Having got ready for the practice of my profession 
and, as I supposed, being qualified to undertake any 
service in it, however intricate and difficult — a young 
lawyer is never so good as those just admitted to the 
bar imagine themselves to be — William and I con- 
cluded that before determining where to settle we 
should make a tour of the Western country to see 
what the prospects of young professional men were 
in the various cities of the West. The extreme West 
then occupied, was bounded by the Mississippi River, 
for when we got to Davenport, in Iowa, the railroad 
went no farther; but Cook and Sargent, the bankers 
there to whom we had letters, kindly said that they 
were building a new road beyond the river, which 
already had reached Cedar Rapids, and they were 
running construction trains on it, and that they 
would give us a ride on one of these so that we could 
say that we had reached the farthest possible point 
West, which we gladly accepted. We did visit many 
of the principal cities, but to our primitive minds, 
accustomed only to the comparatively finished East, 
everything seemed very crude and rough, and we 
found that either we were not ready for the West, 
or the West was not ready for us, although I am 
satisfied that, if we had concluded to remain any- 



[ I04] 
where in that region, we should have soon got used 
to it, and growing up with some young community 
would have attained similar positions to those which 
we afterwards reached nearer home. 

Chicago, I remember, seemed to us to be a very 
unsatisfactory place. It had ceased to be the "dirty 
little dog-hole," which Judge Parker had described 
it to us at the Law School to have been, when he 
first reached it some twenty or thirty years before. 
It had all the appearance of a great city yet to be, 
but it was still in its infancy. I remember that the 
sidewalks were of plank, and sometimes as we walked 
upon them the muddy water spurted up between the 
planks. 

We were not attracted by the methods of the courts 
and bar in the cities which we visited. At one then 
frontier town we heard that the supreme court was 
in session, and, as our wont was, made haste to visit 
it. The administration of justice seemed to be going 
on all right. The jury were in their places, the wit- 
ness on the stand was being examined or cross- 
examined by the lawyer, and the bar was reasonably 
full with something of an audience on the outer circle 
of the court-room, but there did not appear to be 
any judge. A close inspection, however, soon re- 
vealed the soles of a pair of slippers on the bench, 
and the judge was reclining behind them, doubtless 
taking in all the evidence and conducting the case 
with the same authority, but with much less dignity 
than we had been accustomed to see in the courts 



[•05] 

of Massachusetts, especially in Boston; and so we 
very easily made up our minds to seek our fortunes 
nearer home, William, who was much more of a 
home-body than I, to return to Salem. 



VII 

EARLY DAYS IN NEW YORK 

I had long been fascinated with the idea of Hfe 
in New York, and was convinced that the biggest 
place offered the best possible chance for a young 
lawyer. I had been there once before, in 1851, on 
a visit, and I remember that the trains from Boston 
on that occasion stopped at Forty-second Street, and 
individual cars were dragged by horses from there 
down to Canal Street, and discharged their passen- 
gers who were going farther. I knew almost nobody 
in the great city. A graduate of the Harvard Law 
School nowadays coming to New York would find 
thousands of New Englanders here, and among them 
hundreds of his personal acquaintances, but at that 
time it was a comparatively rare thing for emigrants 
from New England to settle here, especially edu- 
cated men, and I do not think that there were more 
than twenty-five Harvard graduates then residing 
in this city. I brought with me one letter of intro- 
duction, however, which proved to be an opening 
wedge for my professional career. It was from Rufus 
Choate, who took quite an interest in my fortunes, 
and addressed to Mr. William M. Evarts, and read 
as follows: 

[106] 



[ I07 ] 

"Boston, 24 Sept. 1855. 
"My dear Mr. Evarts 

"I beg to incur one other obligation to you by 
introducing the bearer my friend and kinsman to 
your kindness. 

"He is just admitted to our bar, was graduated 
at Cambridge with a very high reputation for schol- 
arship and all worth, and comes to the practice of 
the law, I think, with extraordinary promise. He 
has decided to enroll himself among the brave and 
magnanimous of your bar, with a courage not un- 
warranted by his talents, character, ambition and 
power of labor. There is no young man whom I 
love better, or from whom I hope more or as much, 
and if you can do anything to smooth the way to 
his first steps the kindness will be most seasonable 
and will yield all sorts of good fruits. 

"Most truly 
" Your servant and friend 

"RuFus Choate." 

This, certainly, was a very emphatic letter and 
manifested wonderful confidence and affection on 
the part of the writer, and I had to do my best to 
live up to it in all the after-years. 

Mr. Evarts had not at that time attained the 
zenith of his great fame, for he was then only thirty- 
seven years old, but he and his firm of Butler, Evarts 
and Southmayd were already in the front rank of 
the profession, and, perhaps, the busiest office in 



[io8] 

New York, with a remarkable clientage. He rose 
very rapidly to the leadership of the American bar, 
and was engaged in all the greatest causes of his 
time, before entering public life and holding the great 
offices of attorney-general, secretary of state, and 
senator. He received me very warmly, but it was 
several months before he could make a place for 
me in his office. During this time I had quite an 
opportunity to study New York and to become 
acquainted with the habits of life there, which were 
so different from the New England ways, and in 
the meantime, in the offices of my classmates, 
Waring and Norris, and of James Carter, I was 
studying up the code and learning something about 
practice. 

New York was a very different city from what it 
is to-day. Instead of being Greater New York, 
with what the papers to-day say to be a population 
of five and a half millions, it was simply the Island 
of Manhattan, with a population of five hundred 
thousand only, and Brooklyn and the other boroughs, 
instead of being accessible by tubes in a few minutes, 
seemed almost as far away as Boston. There was 
no congestion and no rush anywhere. I remember 
that shortly afterwards, when the Sixth Avenue rail- 
road with its horse-cars was opened as far as Forty- 
second Street, which was then the upper limit of the 
city, it was thought that the final achievement of 
rapid transit had been reached. You could get into 
their cars at the Astor House and reach Forty-second 



WILLIAM M. EVARTS. 



The famous New York lawyer, Attorney-General, Secretary of State, and United 
States Senator. He invited J. H. C. to become junior partner in the firm of 
Evarts and Southmayd in 1859, and the relationship then begun was only dis- 
solved by Mr. Evarts's death. This portrait, painted by William M. Hunt in 
the seventies, shows Mr. Evarts in the prime of life. 



icntage 

he American bar, 
' est causes of h.s 

'■''" -•->•-• holdin^ "■ • real 

of av ry of i i 

vnidior. He rr-priv rmly, ■ 

several mon; nake a place for 

! 'C in his had q 






^nd in 

•t James Car? ^as 

bomethiiig about 



: u.r ^t:aa /ivt^nue rail- 

.aT^Ava .M MAIJJIW ,, 

balinlJ bris .iJsjS lo \-tiis■\:>t^?^ jBisnsO-xsmdjjA' ,iai(wsl ;ItoY >*/s1/1 euomsl siiT 
^ , , , , l«;ariii sdJi ni laijJisq ioiuoi 9*noD9<J aJ.O .H .1 bajiy^i sH, .icaB033 esjBiS 
' -BJE -(I"<> SEW nussd risriJ qirfEnoifcbi sifjbnfi i^jSl ni byfimilJocS bne eJiBvS 

'■ y ' ^ • .sliilo atnhq-sita' ni'»«»va iiM»wod« .wijnsvaa 5rf: 

?-»p'''^ ■ ' -iu eoiild get iiito 

tilt" i reach Forty-second 







1 


- 


Mi^ 


' iBi^^-' *' '3HI 




^^^^B^^^^'SwKt- ^'-' 


■JR^ 


J 


^V^'UHK 




^ 


^^^^^^^^ ^^^^r^W 


Wy--,^. 


tV 


W^^^^^^mJ 1 ' mA 


R^^^ 


1 


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^K m w-k ^^^^^1 


Jm' 


y^btWifit^'i*t 



[ I09] 
Street in forty minutes, which was thought to be 
wonderful. 

My father said to me, when I left home, "I sup- 
pose that you will want some money," and kindly 
offered to furnish me with what I needed, and mea- 
suring the probable cost by the standard that I had 
known in Salem and Cambridge, and not realizing 
that New York even then was a more expensive place, 
I said to him that I thought that forty dollars a 
month would be ample, which I duly received. I 
found it a very close cut, but was too proud to ask 
for more, so I found a boarding-place in which my 
classmate, Addison Brown, was already established, 
at the corner of Bleecker Street and Thomson Street, 
which had previously been the residence of General 
Scott. After he left it several stories had been 
added, and one or two adjoining houses taken in, so 
that it was quite a caravansary. I took a room on 
the fourth floor, for which I had to pay five dollars 
a week, for board and room. The room was so 
small, however, that when I invited anybody to 
come in I had to stand on the outside, so I soon 
ventured upon a larger room on the top floor at five 
dollars and a half a week for room and board, and 
made myself very comfortable, and the walk morn- 
ing and evening from Bleecker to Wall Street gave 
me just a comfortable amount of exercise. 

The social world of the city began to open to me 
in various directions, although in all it was very 
simple and unpretentious. My earliest acquain- 



[no] 

tances were with the Quakers, whose welcome was 
exceedingly cordial, and I have cherished the recol- 
lection of it at a very high value from that day to 
this. The Gibbonses, the Hoppers, and the Hay- 
docks were very remarkable and interesting people. 

Mrs. Abby Hopper Gibbons was a wonderful 
woman with a heart as strong and warm as her head 
was clear. She was engaged in many charities, and 
exerted a wide and very powerful influence in the 
city; and her brother, John Hopper (they were chil- 
dren of the famous Quaker, Isaac T. Hopper), was a 
miracle of fun and drollery, and at the same time a 
marvel of devoted loyalty and affection, and he did 
a vast deal to make my early days in New York 
extremely enjoyable. He was a lawyer, besides 
being the agent of the New England Life Insurance 
Company, and was the soul of hospitality. He was 
noted for his wit and sprightliness, from boyhood in 
Philadelphia and all his life in New York. 

Philadelphia must have been a very quiet place 
at that time, for after his father had moved to New 
York, when he was about twelve years old, complaint 
was made to the mayor of the city by two venerable 
spinsters, sisters who dwelt together in one of the 
Philadelphia houses, that mysterious visitations were 
being made to them at night, which they could not 
possibly account for. It seems that knowing all 
about them, on a return to the city of Brotherly 
Love, he had carefully watched their habits and dis- 
covered at just about what time they were going to 



[II.] 

bed, and as their light was put out the window-sash 
of the room in which they slept together was raised 
by no visible hands, to their very great terror. 
When this had happened for three nights in succes- 
sion they could stand it no longer and complained 
to the chief magistrate, who replied: "Oh, ladies, 
you must not be frightened. I think John Hopper 
must have returned to town." 

I remember that Carter, Thayer, and I used to 
assemble at his house very often on Saturday nights, 
where he treated us most royally. His wife was a 
woman of great beauty and of splendid character, 
who would have graced any station in life. She was 
the daughter of William Henry de Wolfe, one of the 
famous family of that name at Bristol, Rhode Island, 
and the young couple had made a runaway match. 
The indignant father had pursued them, but over- 
took them too late to prevent the marriage, and con- 
tented himself with dealing John a violent blow; but 
John survived that, and lived to take into his own 
house his father-in-law with his wife and invalid 
daughter, and Mr. de Wolfe finally died in his arms. 
They had been for twelve years without children, 
when, to the surprise and delight of everybody who 
knew them, a fine son appeared in the person of De 
Wolfe Hopper, now such a distinguished comedian, 
well known throughout the United States. John was 
so wild with joy at the idea of being a father that he 
could hardly contain himself, and when the boy was 
about a week old one summer morning, finding him 



[112] 

lying naked on the bed, just as his nurse had given 
him his bath, and wishing the whole world to partic- 
ipate in his happiness, he took him by the leg and 
held him out of the window. Until the boy grew 
old enough to run about for himself he used to carry 
him all over the city every fine day, making a seat 
for him upon his cane with the crook of his elbow, 
and in that way they wandered from Forty-second 
Street to the Battery almost daily. One day he 
came near losing the boy, for, entering Madison 
Square with him on his arm (a square which at that 
time was very greatly given up to nurses and chil- 
dren) he went about among them, exclaiming: "See 
what a fine boy I have found. Who's lost a boy f" 
Oddly enough, there was a woman there who had 
recently lost a baby, and was crazy from the eff^ects 
of her affliction, and hearing this outcry she seized 
the baby and claimed it for her own, and John had 
great difficulty with the aid of police in rescuing him- 
self and the child from her attack. As the boy grew 
up he thought of nothing but life upon the stage, 
and I have always thought that all of his comic 
faculty came to him by heredity from his father. 

In fact, his father had always been a devotee of 
the theatre in spite of his Quaker surroundings. 
When the celebrated Fanny Kemble made her first 
appearance in New York he became very much fas- 
cinated by her, and was a constant attendant upon 
her performances. He would exchange his shad- 
belly Quaker coat for a world's people jacket at the- 



["3] 

shop of an apothecary, in the neighborhood of the 
theatre, and buy a ticket to the shilHng gallery. One 
night his father on his return home caught him going 
up-stairs at midnight, shoes in hand, and took him 
to task, and the following colloquy took place: "John, 
where has thee been?" Now John was always 
truthful; under every circumstance you could de- 
pend upon his telling the truth, so he said: "To the 
theatre, father." The old gentleman was very much 
shocked. "What theatre was it, and whom did thee 
see.?" John gave the name of the theatre and the 
name of the famous actress, which disgusted his 
father still further, and he exclaimed: "John, I hope 
this is the first time thee has been to see her." And 
John replied: "No, father. It is the sixty-third 
time." The old gentleman was so overwhelmed that 
he took to his bed again and inflicted no chastisement. 
Nothing could be more simple and almost idyllic 
than the life that these Quakers led, and the house 
of Mrs. Gibbons was a great resort of abolitionists 
and extreme antislavery people from all parts of the 
land, as it was one of the stations of the underground 
railroad by which fugitive slaves found their way 
from the South to Canada. I have dined with that 
family in company with William Lloyd Garrison, and 
sitting at the table with us was a jet black negro who 
was on his way to freedom. The Haydocks, too, 
were splendid people, and were the progenitors of the 
Hallowells, who have since held such a distinguished 
place in Boston. Lucretia Mott, the celebrated fe- 



[■H] 

male preacher of that day, was also a frequent guest, 
and I have been to hear her preach at the Quaker 
meeting-house, which still stands in East Fifteenth 
Street. 

But I was not confined to Quakerdom, for I rapidly 
met many delightful acquaintances in the city. At 
the houses of the leaders of the bar, like Daniel Lord, 
and Mr. Evarts, and others, I found warm friends, 
and I remember at a reception at Mr. Lord's being 
introduced to ex-President Martin Van Buren and 
his attorney-general, Benjamin F. Butler, who both 
died within a few months afterwards. The families 
of Hamilton Fish, and Mrs. Fish's sister, Mrs. Grif- 
fin, and George L. Schuyler, and John Jay, and 
Daniel Leroy were among my earliest friends in New 
York. 

At the house of Mr. Jay, at Bedford, I always 
found a most cordial welcome from him and his de- 
lightful family. He retained unchanged the resi- 
dence of his grandfather, the first chief justice of the 
United States, whose name he bore, and there many 
fascinating historical reminiscences were recalled by 
him. The grandson, John Jay, was in all respects 
as high-toned and patriotic as his grandfather, and 
delighted in nothing so much as in public service. 
He was one of the founders of the Union League Club, 
and intensely interested in all measures of reform 
that came up at that exciting period, which led to 
the club's formation, and his public services after- 
wards as minister to Austria were of great value. 



["5] 

Gouverneur Morris was an eccentric character, but 
a man of very noble nature, as his acts testified, and 
he, too, loved to indulge in memories of the early days 
of the republic. I had always supposed that all the 
public men of the revolutionary period were spotless 
patriots, and worthy of all praise, but I have a sus- 
picion that the world has progressed in every gen- 
eration, for Mr. Morris told me that in his boyhood 
his father, of the same name, who was our minister 
at Paris during the French Revolution and the days 
of the Terror, used to take him with him in his yearly 
drives from Morrisania to Bedford to visit the chief 
justice, and there he overheard their conversation, 
as they dwelt upon their early experiences at the time 
of the formation of the government, and had much to 
say about the performances of the "damned rascals 
of the first Congress," as they called them. 

I think that it would now be hard to find the spot 
at Mott Haven where stood the hospitable mansion 
of Gouverneur Morris, which I often visited. It was 
a somewhat sequestered rural retreat on the banks 
of the Kills, where it was quite practicable at that 
time to fish, but now the whole region has become a 
part of the city, compactly built and without the 
possibility of discovering the remains of the Morris 
mansion. I remember that it contained in one of 
the parlors a complete set of furniture which had 
come from the Tuileries, where it had been used by 
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and was justly 
regarded as a most interesting treasure. 



[1.6] 

The marriage of Mr. Morris's father, I beheve, 
had not suited his relatives of the Morris family, who 
had hoped to be his heirs, as he had long remained a 
bachelor, and he told me that, when they assembled 
to celebrate his birth, the health of the new-born 
child was proposed under the name of Kutusoff, who 
had at that time become a distinguished Russian 
general in the wars of Napoleon, and as commander- 
in-chief of the First Corps of the Russian army against 
the French had gained a victory, and afterwards 
commanded the allied army under the Emperor 
Alexander at Austerlitz. 

Mr. George L. Schuyler and his noble wife, a 
granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, were among 
the most delightful people that I have ever known. 
They were both of really famous historical descent, 
and their home was an extremely attractive and 
happy one. Mr. Schuyler was the most genial and 
delightful of men, never assuming anything or taking 
on airs by reason of his illustrious pedigree and alli- 
ance, and always extremely affable and interesting. 
He told me that he had shaken hands with every 
President except George Washington. His father, 
who had been a member of Congress, and was the 
son of General Philip Schuyler, took George, when he 
was about ten years old, on a visit to Quincy to call 
upon John Adams, and shortly afterwards to Mon- 
ticello to call upon Thomas Jefferson, to be presented 
to those famous founders of the Republic, both of 
whom shortly afterwards died on the same day, on 



[■'7] 

the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declara- 
tion of Independence, which one of them had drawn, 
and the other had done all he could to promote. 
This was one of the most striking historical coin- 
cidences ever known, for in those days, so long be- 
fore the era of travel by steam and communication 
by telegraph, Monticello and Quincy were as far 
apart as New York and China are to-day, and al- 
though John Adams with almost his dying breath had 
said, ''Thomas Jefferson still lives," it was not so, for 
they died together on the same Fourth of July. 

Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler exercised a most graceful 
hospitality, especially avoiding all ostentation or dis- 
play, but giving most agreeable dinners, for one of 
his favorite maxims was that eight was the ideal 
number for a dinner-party, so that all the company 
at table could take part in all the conversation. 
These occasions were very happy ones to remember. 
He lived to a green old age, always taking a warm 
interest in public affairs, and transmitting to his chil- 
dren not only the memory of his unspotted life, but 
a taste for public service of the highest character. 

His son Philip took part in the Civil War on the 
staff of General Wool, and his daughter. Miss Louisa 
Lee Schuyler, has exercised a great and most whole- 
some influence in the promotion of many measures 
that tended to advance the welfare of the community. 
I remember taking part with her in her splendid cru- 
sade for the rescue of the dependent insane of the 
State from the prisons and poorhouses of counties 



[1.8] 

and towns, and transferring them to the care of the 
State itself, which has provided homes of a permanent 
character for them in all respects suitable for their 
condition. It was a fight of many years against all 
sorts of corrupt influences, and she led the way most 
triumphantly from beginning to end. In many other 
services she has shown a tact and power worthy of 
her distinguished progenitors, so that when Columbia 
University, in 1914, conferred upon her the rare honor 
of a degree of Doctor of Laws it was universally re- 
garded as a just recognition of her work and character. 
******** 
But to return to the law. In the early part of 1856 
Mr. Evarts kindly invited me to come into his office, 
and made a seat for me in his own room, and there I 
soon got to be very busy. As a prominent Bachelor 
of Laws of Harvard University and a member of the 
Massachusetts bar, I had looked forward, of course, 
to entering immediately upon a career in the courts, 
but nothing could be further from the actual fact. 
The world does not need the counsel of boys, either 
in court or out, but I was determined, if possible, to 
make myself indispensable in that office, and an easy 
way soon opened, for they found out that I could 
write a good hand, and could keep it up at the rate 
of twelve folios an hour for ten hours a day. There 
were no stenographers, and only an ancient scrivener, 
a regular retainer of the office, and another casual 
friend of his who was called in occasionally, but they 
could not keep up with the rush of work. Mr. But- 



[ "g] 

ler and Mr. Southmayd used to draw tremendously 
long papers, and many of them came into my hands 
to copy, which I did with the greatest avidity, learn- 
ing a great deal all the time as to the preparation of 
papers; and many a long document will be found in 
my handwriting in the county clerk's office and the 
surrogate's court, and the register of deeds of that 
day. And so I gradually became quite necessary. 

I attended courts also at the call of the calendar, 
and can recall the interesting habits of the bar at that 
time. The leaders of the bar always appeared in 
dress suits at ten o'clock in the morning, and the im- 
perturbable George Wood, who was the most famous 
of the chancery lawyers, as some, I think, were then 
called, and who was all brain, made long arguments 
with so little emotion or manifestation of feeling that 
a story was told of him that always impressed me 
very much, for it was said that in an important case 
where he had to make a special effort, one of the 
tails of his dress coat, when he rose to speak, rested 
upon the table at which he had sat, and there it re- 
mained undisturbed during the whole of his argu- 
ment of two hours, to the great entertainment of 
all the bystanders. 

The judges of the courts were all highly respecta- 
ble, but they were very few in number, and they re- 
ceived very small salaries, as compared with those 
now paid. I think that in the Supreme Court there 
were but three judges, who held jury terms and equity 
terms, and then sat together in the general term on 



[ I20] 

appeal. The superior court held a very high place 
and had a very large commercial business, and there 
were, I think, three or four judges there, consisting 
of some famous men like Chief Justice Oakley and 
Judge Duer, who would have been a credit to any 
tribunal an5rwhere. To show how the Federal Gov- 
ernment has gained upon the States until almost the 
entire power of the nation has been concentrated at 
Washington, there was only one judge of the federal 
court in New York at that time, the Honorable 
Samuel R. Betts, and there was hardly business 
enough for him. He was at quite an advanced age, 
and often took naps upon the bench, so that the 
lawyers before him had to raise their voices to a very 
high pitch to wake him up. But Judge Samuel Nel- 
son, who was one of the greatest lawyers and judges 
I ever knew, was then assigned to the second circuit, 
and on very important cases he would come and sit 
with Judge Betts. 

And now how changed it all is ! Some ten federal 
judges holding court all the time can hardly keep up 
with the pressure of business, and when the courts 
open in October many branches are holding separate 
terms, and there is now a bill pending in Washington 
for adding two new judges to the district. In those 
days the practice in the federal court was a terra 
incognita to most lawyers, and a very few offices, 
of which ours was one, had any business there. 

The scriveners, with whom as a skilful writer I 
was intimately associated in my early days in the 



GAMALIEL HODGES— 1766-1850. 

This silhouette of Mr. Choate's grandfather was made when he was about seventy 
years of age. He was a very big man, over six feet and a half tall, and weighed 
over three hundred pounds; although when he was born he is said to have been 
so small that he was put in a silver tankard and the top shut down ! 



le famous men hi 

to any 



c: 'ok 

C 1 



baifsbw bnn JlsJ HecT c bae Js^l zis lavo ,n£rn gid tiav 2 sew sH .sas lo aisj'f 
Inwob Jud2 qoj 3d} bns bisJact isvli'a i> ni Juq sew ad jKdj llsmj os 



[121] 

office, were an interesting lot, most of them Irishmen 
who had done nothing else since their immigration. 
Samuel L. Montgomery, the scrivener of our office, 
known there and to the whole profession as Sam, was 
a truly interesting character. He had been there for 
untold years, and had married, brought up one fam- 
ily, and had lost his wife, and one day he came to 
Mr. Evarts and said that he was going to be married 
again. Well, they congratulated him, the heads of 
the office were much pleased, and gave him a vaca- 
tion of two weeks for his honeymoon, and made up 
a nice little purse for him to take the journey with 
his wife. After the appointed time he returned to 
the office in finest of spirits, and this conversation 
occurred between Mr. Evarts and him: **Well, Sam, 
we are very glad to see you back. Did you have a 
good time.?" "Had a perfect time. Never had 
such a good time in my life." "Well, where did you 
go.?" "Went to Saratoga, Trenton Falls, Niagara 
and back." " Did you have time enough .? " " Plenty 
of time." "Money enough.?" "Yes, I had some 
left." "Well, how did your wife enjoy it.?" Sam 
scratched his head. "Well," said he, "the fact is, 
I left her in Brooklyn." 

The other casual scrivener, who came off and on 
when there was extra work, was named Collins, and 
one day when he had grown quite old he came to 
me and wanted help to get into an old man's home. 
"Well," said I, "Mr. Collins, you don't look as 
though you needed to go to an old man's home. 



[ 122 ] 

You look in fine health and condition. How old 
are you?" "Well, I am eighty-two. I think it is 
time for me to stop work and go into an old man's 
home." "I wish/' said I, "that you would tell me 
how it is that you have kept in such splendid condi- 
tion till eighty-two, for I should like to get there 
myself in as good shape as you are." "Well," said 
he, "I will tell you. I have always kept married. 
I am on my fifth wife now." So I gave him the help 
he wanted for so worthy an object. 

I had always had in mind that I would combine 
with my professional life as much attention to public 
services as was compatible with it, and I had hardly 
been in the office six months before the great cam- 
paign of 1856 came on, when the Republican party 
was formed, and made Fremont and Dayton its can- 
didates to run against Buchanan and Breckinridge. 
The object of its formation was, if possible, to pre- 
vent the further extension of slavery, which had been 
made possible by the legislation in Pierce's adminis- 
tration, during which the famous Kansas-Nebraska 
Act was formed, and left the great northwest region 
possibly open to the introduction of slavery, the Mis- 
souri Compromise of 1820 and the great compromise 
acts of 1850 having been thrown to the winds. Of 
course I joined the Republican party, and remem- 
ber being a member of the Rocky Mountain Cam- 
paign Club, which took rooms in the Stuyvesant In- 
stitute on Broadway near Eighth Street, not far from 
my residence, and Charles A. Dana and John J. 



[ 123] 

Townsend and other men of distinction in later years 
were members. I remember well my first political 
speech for Fremont and Dayton in the summer of 
1856, just after they were nominated. It was made 
at a meeting held on the roof of our boarding-house 
in Bleecker Street, gotten up by Judge Brown and 
E. C. Benedict, long since known as Commodore 
Benedict, the friend of Grover Cleveland. We as- 
sembled after dinner, and I made the principal speech, 
which seemed to entertain and satisfy the large audi- 
ence consisting of inmates of the house, and then 
later before the election I made a still more impor- 
tant speech at Constitution Hall, corner of Thirty- 
fourth Street and Eighth Avenue. Huge placards 
were set up in the vicinity, representing an express- 
train, with General Fremont running the train as en- 
gineer, and running over an old buck that lay upon 
the track representing Buchanan, and under this in 
great capitals was a notice that Joseph H. Choate 
and others would address the meeting, and that vic- 
tory was certain. It was a very good meeting in 
which Mr. Carter and the Reverend O. B. Frothing- 
ham took part, giving a religious aspect to the affair. 
Some fifty years afterwards I found one of those pla- 
cards in overhauling my papers, had it framed, and 
sent it to the Union League Club where, I believe, 
it is still preserved in the archives as showing an 
important step in the history of the Republican party. 
I had the pleasure of meeting John Fremont in 
Charles Gould's office in Wall Street before the elec- 



[ 124] 

tion, and was impressed with the idea that he was 
a very light character and contained no great amount 
of what is known as presidential timber, and it was 
probably well for us that we were thoroughly beaten. 
Nevertheless the campaign, which was well fought 
(for after all Buchanan was a minority President, and 
Fremont had a million and a half of votes to Buchan- 
an's eighteen hundred thousand), paved the way for 
the triumphant election of Lincoln and the saving 
of the country four years afterwards. 

Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Fish undoubtedly occu- 
pied at that time the foremost place in the social 
world of New York, although he had not attained to 
the world-wide distinction that he afterwards ac- 
quired in his eight years' service with President Grant 
as his secretary of state. Mrs. Fish, like her sister 
Mrs. Griffin, was a lady of great charm, and they 
exercised a most dignified and generous hospitality 
entirely free from the extravagance and dissipation 
that has of late marked what is called society in New 
York City. I regarded it as a very great honor to 
be invited now and then to their dinners, where I 
always found myself among the best people. 

A very early admission to the Century Club in 
1858 brought me into relations with the most charm- 
ing circle of men. The Club then consisted of some- 
thing less than two hundred members, of whom al- 
most all the original members of the club, founded in 
1846, still survived. Time was not so pressing then 
as it has since become, and comparative leisure pre- 



[125] 

vailed with them all, so that not only on Saturday 
nights, but on almost every night in the week, ex- 
cept Sunday, many of these delightful old members 
were present, and we youngsters sat at their feet in 
devout admiration. Such men as Gulian Crommelin 
Verplanck, William Cullen Bryant, Doctor Bellows, 
the two Kembles, Gouverneur and William, Charles 
M. Leupp, Jonathan Sturges, John H. Gourlie, and 
others of great distinction, including many artists 
like Daniel Huntington, Charles C. Ingham, Fred- 
erick E. Church, John F. Kensett, and others of their 
profession, which always has constituted a very 
prominent element in the club, formed such a group 
of character and good fame as can hardly be found 
at the present day in any club in New York, I think. 
It was an immense privilege and, in fact, the com- 
pletion of a liberal education to be thrown among 
such men, intercourse with whom contrasted very 
strongly with my simple and secluded life at Salem. 
The Century occupied a very modest building in 
Fifteenth Street. There was no cuisine, and the only 
refreshments on ordinary nights consisted of oysters, 
which we cooked ourselves in chafing-dishes, and a 
favorite drink was what was called a Renwick, in- 
vented and introduced by Professor Renwick of 
Columbia College, containing a little sprinkling of 
Jamaica rum. Small as the body was, it enjoyed al- 
most an international reputation, and every stranger 
of distinction that came to the city was sure to be 
introduced there at the meetings on Saturday night. 



[126] 

which were always largely frequented by the mem- 
bers. Thackeray, Tom Hughes, and many other 
famous Englishmen appeared there, and on my first 
visit to London, in 1879, Tom Hughes was good 
enough to take me to a meeting of a club that he had 
organized in the same name, but which, I believe, 
did not long survive. At any rate, it never attained 
anything like the distinction of its namesake. 

I ought not to forget one other and very different 
form of social intercourse, which I enjoyed from the 
very day of my landing in New York, and that was 
at Doctor Bellows's church, which still stands on 
the corner of Twentieth Street and Fourth Avenue, 
and which was then often spoken of derisively by 
our orthodox friends as the "beefsteak" or "zebra" 
church, from its peculiar architecture. It was fre- 
quented by a large number of educated and highly 
intelligent people, largely from New England, and 
Doctor Bellows was a noble element in the life of 
New York, and a very eloquent and powerful 
preacher. I cherish his memory most devoutly as 
my first, last, and only pastor, and keep his portrait 
close by me by night and by day in memory of the 
wonderfully wholesome influence that he exercised 
upon my personal life. He was a man of most un- 
tiring energy, not only in his profession, but in all 
other good works, and his wonderful achievements 
a few years afterwards in organizing and main- 
taining throughout the Civil War the United 
States Sanitary Commission, of which he was presi- 



1 127 1 

dent, has given him, I beHeve, a lasting place in 
history. 

Thus it may be conceded that from the outset I 
enjoyed very choice and unique social privileges, 
and although in my subsequent busy life I had to 
curtail indulgence in them somewhat, they have ever 
been in the retrospect a most satisfactory pleasure. 



VIII 
AT THE NEW YORK BAR 

The conduct of law business in those primitive 
days was very different in every particular from the 
strikingly commercial methods into which the pro- 
fession has fallen, or risen, in recent years. For 
instance, the office of Butler, Evarts & Southmayd 
consisted of four very moderate-sized rooms on the 
second floor of 2 Hanover Street, a little building 
which has long ago been demolished, and the place in- 
cluded in the great banking-house of Brown Brothers 
& Company. There were only two clerks besides 
myself in the office and one scrivener. There was 
no railing, which now marks every office that I 
know about and which we forebade as long as it 
was possible, and there were no retiring rooms for 
the partners and leading associates in the office. 
Cashier's and accountant's rooms would have been 
thought absolutely unprofessional, as the lawyers of 
the establishment did their own work. 

It was not long after I had established my prowess 
as a scrivener, as I have already described, that I 
gradually began to come into the kind of work to 
which I had looked forward when I chose the law as 
my profession, and I had the singular good luck, 

[128] 



[ 129] 

quite unprecedented, I think, then and now, to serve 
for some ten years as junior to Mr. Evarts in the con- 
duct of the Htigation which then constituted a very 
considerable portion of the business of the office, and 
occasionally the litigation into which Mr. Evarts was 
called as counsel. I learned to prepare the cases for 
trial and for argument, and then to assist in prepar- 
ing my senior for his vastly more important part of 
the work. At first I was amazed at his wonderful 
power of assimilating everything that I did, and the 
extraordinary speed with which he would make him- 
self master of all the questions involved in a case to 
be tried. For he would come into court, when he 
found that he could rely upon my preparation, ab- 
solutely knowing nothing about the case, and would 
assume the conduct of it, and in a half-day would 
appear to have possessed himself of every question 
to be tried in it, and of every leading bit of evidence 
to be presented, so that from that time on to the end 
of the case, he was fully imbued with all that was 
necessary for its proper presentation. I had never 
seen anything like this mental action before, and 
never realized, until I came to stand in the same re- 
lation to my junior in long subsequent years, that it 
was simply an acquired faculty to which a man of 
quick brain and energetic nervous action could qualify 
himself. 

Mr. Evarts, although then only thirty-eight years 
old, was rapidly rising to the foremost place in the 
profession, and here I think I ought to say something 



[ I30] 

a little more at large about his wonderful faculties 
and his extraordinary career. 

He was already only a few steps behind the very 
leaders of the bar at that time. With such men as 
Francis B. Cutting, George Wood, Charles O'Conor, 
James T. Brady, Daniel Lord, William Curtis Noyes, 
and Marshall S. Bidwell he was found to be in daily 
conflict, and his opinion on important questions was 
already much in demand. Of these men it is, I think, 
fair to say that their superiors have never been pro- 
duced at the New York bar from that day to this. 

Francis B. Cutting was, perhaps, the most formida- 
ble advocate in court that ever was at work in New 
York. He was of tremendous physical force, and 
seemed to throw all his energy of body and mind 
into the case that he was for the time conducting. 
He was a handsome creature, and in this respect I 
think was without an equal. In all the work of the 
courts, in the examination of witnesses, in the dis- 
cussion of the questions of evidence, and in the pres- 
entation of the case to the court or the jury, as might 
be, he had no superior, and to be brought in conflict 
with him led to a rapid education of his juniors. He 
was in all the leading cases, but his professional career 
was brought to a sudden end in the trial of the Par- 
rish will case in 1858, a case which was one of the 
very leading cases up to that time in the history of 
New York on the subject of testamentary capacity. 
Right in the midst of it he broke down suddenly and 
finally, so that I think he never appeared in court 



[131] 

again. And it shows what a point in advancement 
Mr. Evarts had already reached that he was called 
into the case as Mr. Cutting's successor, and proved 
himself fully equal to the conduct of it; and from 
that time I think he ranked as one of the foremost 
leaders of the bar in New York, and, of course, in 
the country at large. 

Mr. O'Conor was by common consent the fore- 
most of the great lawyers of the day. In power of 
logic, in keen and incisive criticism, in fierceness of 
attack and defense, and in the complete mastery of 
the law he was certainly without a superior. 

Mr. Daniel Lord was of a wholly different type, but 
was called upon every day to cope with O'Conor. 
Immense weight of character, absolute fidelity to 
the client and the cause, untiring industry, excellent 
manners, and never-failing courtesy, especially to- 
wards his juniors, were qualities the combination of 
which made him irresistible whenever he had a fair 
case to present, and as Mr. Evarts had been brought 
up in his office and graduated from there some fifteen 
years before, we looked upon him naturally with the 
greatest reverence, to which he was fully entitled. 

Mr. William Curtis Noyes was another model of 
professional excellence and success. He was more 
like the commercial lawyer of to-day than any of his 
compeers, and was, I believe, perhaps the first exam- 
ple that we had of a counsellor fully qualified to ini- 
tiate and carry on great corporate organizations, 
and I think that, up to the time that death struck 



[ 132 ] 
him from the roll, he might be regarded as the most 
successful lawyer of his time. 

James T. Brady was one of the most delightful 
men I have ever met. He was a real orator and was 
largely engaged in defense of criminal cases, although 
he was quite equal to any civil procedure that might 
arise; his striking personality as a witty and jovial 
Irishman fully made up for any lack of legal learning 
and entitled him to a place in the front rank. He 
was one of the dearest and most fascinating of men; 
always frank and open, having, so far as I could see, 
nothing to conceal and no desire to conceal anything, 
and he commanded a popularity far exceeding that 
which at that time, I think, any of his associates in 
the profession enjoyed. He was always in demand 
for great public meetings and never failed to make 
a first-rate speech. 

Marshall S. Bidwell was a lawyer of great learning. 
Descended from a famous lawyer of the same name, 
he had practised in Canada for many years, and had 
become the leader of the Liberal party there previous 
to and during the Rebellion of 1837, and became so 
formidable to the government that he was ordered 
to leave the country, and he moved to New York 
City where he subsequently practised law and took 
a prominent position. He left his name upon the 
profession by establishing the office which, under the 
name of Bidwell & Strong, Strong & Cadwalader, and 
now Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, has main- 
tained such an enviable position in the city. 



< 




o 




ffi 




u 




o 


J 


z 


00 






J 




05 


vO 


U 


■^ 


H 


u 


tfl 


J3 




o 


u 




2 


o 






Ij 


1* 


o 


CIO 


u. 


'u 


< 


u. 2 


u 


H S 




>% 




u< 




•r « 




1^ 




b >. 




V .w 




^ «•-• 




«* 








(0 o 




3§ 




>.-a 




oS 




g s 








VO — 




■s-s 






... _:ady wj> dnc of the most dr^:ohtfi;i 
I have ever m' 
]a"gq|y engaged in defe cases, although 

ure that r 



e front rank 
«st fascinatinf^ 



5 1':^ 





> 


he V® 


^ ; 




' ;.-' 


■a 


^ 


s 


v»^ ' 


sp 


' C/ 


Sr 


•^ 


w 


. jj- ■. 


H 


a.- 


CV, 


o 




- u 


u; 


•■■ O 


r< 


o 


l* 


a'« 


c 


L-=- 


^c 



3'|* , 



o, 5* 



S. 2 






r 



e which, i* 
f! a t n e of 1^ ii :ng & Cad walade; 

Cadw kersiia 



' -="^ 



[ 133 1 

Among this group my senior found a fitting place 
in the legal world and was constantly engaged in the 
most vigorous kind of work. I regret very much that 
although fifteen years have passed since his death no 
adequate memoir of Mr. Evarts has as yet been pro- 
duced, and the number of those who knew him well 
is rapidly diminishing. Taking him for all in all, he 
was the quickest-witted man that I have ever known 
on either side of the water, and in the course of a 
long life I have met many of the foremost men of 
intellect and action, both here and in Great Britain. 
Nothing could possibly escape him, and his mind 
seemed to flash instantaneously, no matter what was 
the subject that engaged his attention. He was ex- 
ceedingly fortunate, too, in being at the height of 
his powers during the most interesting period of our 
history, and it so happened that four or five of the 
greatest and most interesting causes that have ever 
engaged the attention of our courts came when he 
was at the head of the profession, and as such 
was naturally called upon to take a leading part in 
them. 

The Lemmon slave case, in the court of appeals 
at Albany, involved most interesting questions in 
regard to the application of the Fugitive Slave Law, 
and he was retained by the State of New York as 
counsel to maintain the right of the alleged slave to 
his liberty. It happens to few lawyers in a single 
life to be called on to lead in four such cases as the 
Geneva Arbitration, the Electoral Commission, the 



[134] 

impeachment of President Johnson, and the trial of 
the case of Tilton against Beecher. 

The Geneva Arbitration was the one great histori- 
cal case which would form a fitting ornament and 
achievement of any great professional career. He 
had very powerful associates in Caleb Gushing, of 
Massachusetts, and Morrison R. Waite, of Ohio, 
who afterwards became chief justice of the Supreme 
Court, and was opposed by Sir Roundell Palmer, who 
for his great services in the case was afterwards raised 
to the peerage and became Lord Chancellor of Eng- 
land, as Lord Selborne. It was a case of truly in- 
ternational importance, and may safely be said to 
have attracted the attention of the whole world. It 
was a natural sequel to those alarming differences 
which had arisen between the two countries out of 
the conduct of Great Britain in letting out the 
Alahama and the other sea raiders to prey upon the 
commerce of America during our Civil War, and 
which, in effect, did really destroy it for the time 
being. I do not suppose that any legal controversy 
ever enlisted and excited the feelings of the people 
of two great nations so much. He led with great 
distinction and had the good fortune to be the winner 
of the case, which resulted in what I believe to have 
been the largest pecuniary award ever recovered in 
such an arbitration, and when he returned to America, 
bringing his sheaves with him in the shape of fifteen 
millions of dollars as the result of his efforts, the en- 
thusiasm with which he was met knew no bounds. 



[135] 

This was the finest laurel Mr. Evarts ever won, 
and from the novelty and world-wide interest in 
the case, it is, perhaps, the most notable professional 
achievement that ever fell to the lot of any Ameri- 
can advocate. Making full allowance for all the 
aid rendered by his distinguished associates, there 
is no doubt that he is entitled to the chief credit 
for the grand result, and the pecuniary success of 
it was nothing compared to its immense value as 
establishing the supremacy of arbitration as the 
only sure means of settling international quarrels 
between great nations, for this question had been 
threatening war from the time of the escape of the 
Alabama. 

The trial of the impeachment of President John- 
son was one of the grandest and most thrilling legal 
conflicts that has ever taken place anywhere. The 
President had undoubtedly been guilty of very im- 
prudent conduct, but the narrow technical issue on 
which the case chiefly turned, his alleged violation of 
the Tenure of Office Act, raised a constitutional ques- 
tion which should easily have protected him before 
any tribunal. It seemed to me at the time that the 
impeachment of the President was one of those high- 
handed and desperate attempts which are sometimes 
made in seasons of great party excitement, not only 
to oust the President from office, but for the time 
being to paralyze the executive office itself, and to 
usurp on the part of the House of Representatives 
the whole executive power of the government. The 



[136] 

purpose of the impeachment, if they could succeed 
in removing the President, to put the office in tiie 
hands of an extremely zealous leader of the party, 
was never disavowed, and so it required, as it seemed 
to me, great courage on the part of Mr. Evarts, who 
had been a lifelong Republican, to accept a retainer 
from the President, and to maintain his cause and 
the integrity of his great office to the best of his abil- 
ity. His conduct of the case as a forensic perform- 
ance will never, I think, be forgotten. He was asso- 
ciated with two great lawyers, both of whom were 
considerably older than himself, William S. Gros- 
beck, of Cincinnati, and Judge Benjamin R. Curtis, 
of Boston, but Mr. Evarts had to bear the brunt of 
the case and was found to be not only physically but 
mentally fully adequate to the occasion. His ex- 
treme readiness on the floor, his startling wit, his 
broad ability to grapple with all the legal and con- 
stitutional questions that arose, made him a very 
conspicuous figure in the case. It may be, and I 
think it is the case, that as the Senate, which formed 
with the Supreme Court the tribunal to hear and 
determine the case, was then constituted, it would 
have been impossible to obtain the two-thirds vote 
necessary for a verdict of removal, for there were a 
number of senators in whose minds patriotism was 
before party, and I have always regarded it as one 
of the most brave and public-spirited triumphs of 
good conscience that seven senators were found un- 
der the lead of Mr. Fessenden and Mr. Trumbull, to 



[ 137] 

defy the imperious dictates of their party and vote 
for acquittal of the President. 

The Electoral Commission was a very rare and an 
absolutely unique form of litigation as a means of 
settling a contested election for the presidency, and 
although it had no international bearings, it put to 
a severe test the possibility of adjusting such a con- 
test without resort to force. If Mr. Tilden had been 
more pugnacious and had really claimed what his 
followers all believed — that he was entitled to a 
plurality of votes of some two hundred and fifty 
thousand — a contest of force for the position might 
well have taken place, as General Grant, then Presi- 
dent and commander-in-chief of the army and navy 
of the United States, would certainly have resisted 
the claim. It was a very happy outcome from a 
most dangerous issue, and the counsel who conducted 
the controversy before the commission, of whom Mr. 
Evarts was the chief on the Republican side, are en- 
titled to the very greatest credit for their devotion 
to the case. 

By virtue of the extreme prominence of the part 
taken by Mr. Evarts In the Geneva Award and In the 
Electoral Commission, he was practically compelled 
to devote the rest of his life to the public service, and 
in the great offices of attorney-general of the United 
States, secretary of state, and senator from New 
York he certainly rendered admirable service to the 
whole nation. There is no doubt that notwithstand- 
ing the result of the Electoral Commission a cloud 



[•38] 

of doubt and suspicion rested upon the title of Presi- 
dent Hayes, and it was by the happy selection of a 
very powerful and public-spirited cabinet, of which 
Mr. Evarts was, as secretary of state, at the head, 
that this embarrassment was completely overcome, 
so that the administration of Mr. Hayes will be found 
to rank very high in the history of good government 
with any that preceded or followed it. 

The case of Tilton against Beecher was not only 
infinitely curious and interesting, but its conduct on 
the part of the defense, in which Mr. Evarts led, was 
one that called forth the highest powers of advocacy. 
The most distinguished clergyman in the United 
States was put on trial for alleged acts of gross im- 
morality, of which he doubtless was entirely innocent. 
The trial occupied many weeks, and of course every 
word that was uttered in the court-room was bruited 
abroad throughout the country as far as the press 
could carry it. The arguments in summing up were 
of inordinate length, Mr. Evarts's, I think, occupying 
nine days, or seven days, and Mr. Beech's for the 
plaintiff nearly as long; but the whole history of the 
case, every consideration and circumstance that could 
possibly have any material bearing upon the issue, 
were all contained in the first day of his seven days' 
argument. Mr. Evarts must have been in complete 
sympathy from the start with his distinguished client; 
they were both of that stern old Puritan descent, 
origin, and discipline which had continued in Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut undiluted down to their 



[ 139] 
time, and I have often said to Mr. Evarts that I 
thought his own mental and moral quaUties were as 
fully displayed in his first day's argument as those of 
his great client. 

Thus it appears that Mr. Evarts easily held to the 
end of his days the well-earned post of the greatest 
and most famous advocate at the American bar. 

Such was the man with whom, from a point mid- 
way in his great professional career, I was closely as- 
sociated until his death forty years afterwards, and 
the digression which I have made to sketch his char- 
acter was necessary to show the very unusual and, 
indeed, unique advantage that I enjoyed from the 
very outset of my young professional life. I cannot 
recall any other instance of a lawyer in America hav- 
ing such an advantage at the start. In England, 
where the distinction of the profession between bar- 
risters and attorneys is strictly maintained, there is 
a somewhat similar relation at times established be- 
tween the leaders of the bar and their juniors. For 
instance, I have heard that Lord Haldane, who came 
afterwards to be Lord Chancellor, after a most dis- 
tinguished professional career at the bar, especially 
in the chancery side of the practice, '' devilled " as 
they call it, for twelve years at the beginning with 
Lord Davey. 

Lord Davey, himself, had been very eminent at 
the chancery bar, and is believed to have had the 
largest professional income of any lawyer there from 
private practice, not including those who had held 



[ ho] 

the office of attorney-general, or solicitor-general, and 
had in those days been permitted to continue their 
private practice at the same time, and who, of course, 
enjoyed in the matter of fees a very great advantage. 
For instance, it was the common talk of the profes- 
sion, when I was in England, that Sir Roundeli 
Palmer, already referred to as the leading counsel for 
Great Britain in the Geneva Arbitration, had in one 
year, while attorney-general, realized the net sum of 
fifty thousand pounds, but it was also said that he 
worked for it day and night the year round, from 
Monday morning until Saturday night, and that one 
day, when Mr. Goldwin Smith needed very much to 
see him and called at his chambers for the purpose, 
his clerk said: "Is it absolutely necessary for you to 
see him?" To which Mr. Smith replied that he 
thought that it was. "Well," said the clerk, "if you 
say it is necessary, you can see him, but I would 
advise you not to, for he hasn't been in bed since 
Sunday night," and this was Thursday. 

The devilling process consisted very much in what 
I did so long for Mr. Evarts, working up the cases, 
studying the questions, preparing a brief or memo- 
randum for the senior, and being kept for the time 
somewhat in the shade, but when Lord Davey was 
raised to the bench, Lord Haldane, then, of course, 
Mr. Haldane, came into full possession of his re- 
ward, for he immediately succeeded to about half of 
the business that Lord Davey had enjoyed; and, 
throwing off the devil's mask at once, came into a 



[•41] 

place of great prominence in the profession. So I 
enjoyed during my term of ten or twelve years of 
subordinate service all the advantages which are 
open to the young English barrister and which are 
almost wholly unknown here, and I never can suffi- 
ciently express my obligations and gratitude to Mr. 
Evarts for giving me this great opportunity. 

But I am getting a little ahead of my story and 
must go back to the beginning, when I entered the 
law office in Hanover Street as a student in January, 

1856. After I had been there about six months the 
firm proposed that I should remain with them for a 
year as a clerk, there being only two others occupying 
that relation. I was to receive five hundred dollars. 
I gladly accepted the offer and thought myself very 
rich, and I think that I enjoyed that five hundred 
dollars more than I ever enjoyed the greater indi- 
vidual fees which came to me in after years, for I 
was immediately able to write to my father that 
he would not have to send me any more money, 
as I could take care of myself, and so relieve the 
poorly furnished family purse of that much of the 
drain upon it. After a year, at the beginning of 

1857, the firm proposed that I should continue for 
another year, and as an inducement off^ered me a 
salary of eight hundred dollars, and that I might 
do any business of my own that should happen to 
come to me, and in that year I received, besides 
my salary, about five hundred dollars in fees, so 
that at the beginning of 1857 I really thought my- 



[ 142] 

self a Croesus. My financial ambition was not very- 
lofty, for I remember very well feeling and saying 
at that time that, if I could ever find myself the 
owner of accumulations to the amount of ten thou- 
sand dollars, I should be perfectly satisfied and 
never want more. 

At this time, too, my large earnings of one thou- 
sand three hundred dollars a year enabled me to begin 
to accumulate, for I have always thought that it 
was the duty of every lawyer to begin to provide for 
his future in that way as soon as possible. I never 
went quite to the extreme of Mr. Southmayd, who 
used to preach the doctrine of self-denial very ur- 
gently, and declare it to be the duty of every lawyer 
to accumulate his entire professional income from 
the start. "But," said I, "it isn't everybody that 
can do that, for we must live." "No," said he, 
"that doesn't follow; that is not at all necessary." 
It had not been necessary in his case, because he, 
fortunately, lived at home and had no expenses ex- 
cept for his clothes, and those were simple and mod- 
est, for he always patronized the same tailor, and 
hating to go to be measured or to try on, he fell into 
the habit of sending a semiannual message to his 
tailor: "Two suits like the last." So, for his sixty 
years, there was never any change in the fashion of 
his garments. But there is no such wonderful rule 
for a young lawyer, no such aid in his personal ad- 
vancement, as to begin to accumulate as early as 
possible, no matter how little, for he begins in that 



[143] 

way to have income that earns itself, wholly inde- 
pendent of his own exertions. 

Thus I continued in the office of my superiors for 
about three years, until in 1858, seeing no prospect 
of any further advance in that office and feeling my- 
self already fledged, I struck out for myself and 
opened a law office in Wall Street in partnership with 
William Henry Leon Barnes, a year or two my junior. 
Both of us were in the same line, ambitious to become 
court lawyers, he having been for a year or two with 
Mr. Charles O'Conor, as I had been with Mr. 
Evarts. Possibly we might have done very well in 
long-continued partnership, although I have my 
doubts about that, because we were too much in 
the same line; but he got married and went off for a 
very long wedding-tour, which took him to Europe 
for several months. 

In the meantime, Mr. Evarts began to approach 
me with new overtures, asking at first if I did not 
know of any young man whom they could get to 
come in with them to help in the business of the firm. 
Of course I said I did not. But he from time to 
time continued his approaches, and finally said: 
"You don't seem to understand what I am after. 
We want you back in the office, and to come in as 
a member of the firm." Of course I could not re- 
sist this splendid opportunity, because the firm was 
certainly at that time the leading firm in the city. 
So the firm Choate & Barnes was dissolved, and 
Barnes, who was certainly one of the most brilliant 



[ 144] 
young men of his time, went to try his fortunes in 
Cahfornia, where he became connected with one of 
the foremost lawyers there, and had a very successful 
career. 

I wish that I could find the letter that Mr. Evarts 
wrote to me stating the terms on which I could come 
in with them, for in a few words it furnished a very 
good illustration of the situation of the bar at that 
time, so far as money was concerned. The idea of 
lawyers making great fortunes appears never to have 
occurred to anybody. The law was a strict profes- 
sion, and was satisfied with ordinary and reasonable 
rewards. He wrote that they would like to have me 
join the firm as a partner, and that I should receive 
fifteen per cent of the income, not including, however, 
his own counsel cases, those in which he was employed 
by other lawyers and with which his firm had noth- 
ing to do. He added that while he could not state 
exactly what this would amount to, he thought that 
I might safely count upon at least three thousand a 
year. This would make the entire office income 
twenty thousand dollars, instead of the half million 
which I understand in these later days some law 
oflftces enjoy. Well, I thought that my fortune was 
certainly made, for it had never occurred to me that 
in five years after leaving the law school I could 
come into such an income as it would give me, and 
which, I suppose, measured by modern standards, was 
equal to four or five times the amount to-day. From 
this time forward I not only had the great privilege 



ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE FORMATION OF THE FIRM OF CHOATE 
AND BARNES, IN 1858. 

This notice was found among Mr. Choate's papers, and must have been issued just 
a few months before he joined the firm of Evarts and Southmayd. 



I very s; 

1 WIS' !id find the letter that Mr. E 

e to jiie biatiag tl :h I could 

a vitb them, for 'v .-!->- 

good iiiustration o; . 
time, so far 3S TT»on<-^ 
lawyers ma 

occurred to anybody. 1 
sion, and was satis " 
-• "•^^ Hev, ,.;.,.. 



, IS afte. .;OoI I 

<»mp into such ould give me. 

3TAOHD TO M^ri 3HT -10 MOlTAMMOi aHT 10 TOaMaOMUOWWA 

Jam b-iuiii flssd avBil horn bne .sisi^Bq 8'Mcod3 .iM gnoma bjmol ;«bv saiJon a'stT ff 
.byemrfluoS bns eJifivS lo rrnrt sdj bsnioi ari aiolsd etljiiom wait fi 

iu.- imie lorwara 1 not only iiaa tne great privilege 



No. 62 WALL STREET. 

GyVdf ^//ft/.-, C'-Zf/f/ffi/ j, AV'.^cS' 

//fif/ t?f 07H/ fi*hf O/fh/on/fi /-//, /a'SS', mr .i/ta// 
/■r/ //fi/iAu /< n//ff)'/ /i ''"'V /• f ■>'/'/' L //f ///> I'O'tirtt.t 
/•7tif)c/u.i r/ ///f ///f/fju'-ff' it'/iie/t you })finj /■> /fO/i-tf/ 



f/ I }//ff/'t/ /r f/.t. 



Vf??/ Q/to/// y/f'/fn-t. 



\VillinTii If. L. P,ani<- 



[H5] 

of working with Mr. Evarts, to which I have already 
referred, but gradually began to be employed inde- 
pendently of that. The mere fact of my having been 
taken into so distinguished a firm gave me a sort of 
personal standing of my own, and clients began to 
come to me, and sometimes in Mr. Evarts's absence, 
and especially in the absence of the other members 
of the firm, I was called upon in emergencies to act 
for myself. By dint of untiring industry and reason- 
able ingenuity and, I must admit, some audacity, I 
began to make headway quite rapidly. 

I remember very well my first great constitutional 
case, which was as amusing as it was audacious. 
General James Watson Webb, who had been an in- 
timate friend of Mr. Evarts and Mr. Prescott Hall, 
and a lot of other prominent men and good livers in 
New York, and who had been editor of The Courier 
and The Enquirer, and a loyal supporter of William 
H. Seward, came into the office one Saturday after- 
noon and inquired for Mr. Evarts. Of course Mr. 
Evarts was never there on Saturday afternoon, and 
he said, *'Well, then, you must help me," and he 
stated his case. He had just been appointed minis- 
ter to Brazil by President Lincoln, and had made all 
his arrangements to sail on the following Wednesday, 
when, to his infinite surprise, he had been served with 
short summonses, as they were called, in the Marine 
Court, which were returnable on the following Tues- 
day, one day before he was to sail. As several parties 
to whom he was indebted for these small sums were 



[146] 

acting together, he had found out that there was a 
conspiracy among them to get judgment on Tuesday 
and to seize his trunks as he was going on board the 
steamer, and so prevent his saiHng altogether. 
They were probably the parties from whom he had 
got more or less of his outfit. 

*'Well," said I, "General Webb, what is your de- 
fense .? " " I am sure I don't know," said he. " Have 
you had these goods?" "Yes." "Have you paid 
for them.?" "No, I had no money." "Well, how 
came they to sue you in the Marine Court, of all 
places in the world.?" "Well," said he, "it is just 
as I say, a conspiracy to prevent my sailing. You 
must put in a defense." I reflected and said: "Well, 
I will try, but I am not at all sure that it will succeed." 
" Do the best you can," said he. " Have you got your 
commission .?" I asked. He took it out of his pocket, 
signed Abraham Lincoln, President; William H. 
Seward, Secretary of State, and with a big seal of the 
United States upon it which looked as big as a large 
platter, and which I thought would make a great 
impression in court, especially in the Marine Court, 
which was a small municipal tribunal of very limited 
jurisdiction. So I interposed the plea that by the 
Constitution of the United States the Federal Courts 
had exclusive jurisdiction of all suits afl^ecting am- 
bassadors, public ministers, and consuls, and on 
Tuesday, the return day, I appeared in court and 
interposed that plea. A very eminent lawyer of that 
day, many years my senior, appeared on the other 



ia^d 



[H7] 

side, and proposed to pooh ! pooh ! me out of court. 
**Why," said he, *'your Honor, Mr. Choate is en- 
deavoring to impose upon you. The clause in the 
Constitution of the United States, to which he refers, 
giving the Federal Courts exclusive jurisdiction of all 
suits affecting ambassadors, public ministers, and 
consuls, refers only to foreign ambassadors, public 
ministers, and consuls." I insisted, on the other 
hand, that there was no such word as "foreign" in 
the Constitution, and that the clause in question 
included all ambassadors, public ministers, and con- 
suls. "Will your Honor please send for the Consti- 
tution, and then, perhaps, we shall see who is trying 
to impose upon the court." So the Constitution was 
brought and read, and it turned out that I was right. 
The word "foreign" was not in it, and we argued it 
to and fro on the reason of the thing, and Judge 
Henry Alker, who held the court and was half Irish- 
man and half Frenchman, and a brother-in-law of 
James T. Brady, to whom I have already referred, 
took the papers for consideration, and in the after- 
noon he rendered a decision in my favor, dismissing 
all the cases, and the general went on his watery way 
to Brazil unimpeded by judgments or executions. 
It was quite a professional triumph, and the best of 
it was that in due time I sent to the general a bill 
for my services, of which he never took any notice. 
But I have heard cases argued in the Supreme Court 
at Washington, constitutional cases, too, which had 
very much less merit in them than the one which I 



[148] 

then presented to the Marine Court with so much 
success. The Supreme Court of the State, however, 
to whom one of the creditors had resorted when the 
case came on there in the fall, laughed the defense 
out of court, and the creditors found ample means 
to recover judgments, which, probably, were not 
worth much more than the paper on which they 
were written. 

I worked like a Trojan at the law. For nearly 
forty years (to be exact, for thirty-seven years), until 
I had the honor to be appointed ambassador to Eng- 
land in 1899, I labored steadily at the preparation, 
trial, and arguments of cases in the courts, with 
hardly a break from the first Monday of October 
round to the last Friday of June. In the course of 
that time I disposed of an enormous number of 
cases, steadily growing in importance and difficulty, 
and without any failure of health. This was a rare 
blessing, for almost every lawyer that I have known 
who has worked under the same pressure, and there 
were very few of them, suffered at least one break- 
down, which disabled him for a time. 

When I came to see how the English lawyers work 
and how they are relieved by frequent holidays, I 
wondered that we had ever maintained our arduous 
struggle through the year without breakdowns. 
There the courts come in in October and continue 
their sessions for eight or nine weeks until Christmas, 
when they have a two weeks' holiday, and every busy 
barrister drops his briefs and makes for the Conti- 



[ 149] 

nent or for the mountains, and has a real period for 
rest and recruiting; then they come in again and 
work for eight or nine weeks more, which brings them 
to the Easter recess, another real hohday of ten or 
twelve days with the same advantage; another eight 
or ten weeks of work and Whitsuntide arrives (a 
third intermediate holiday of which we know nothing 
and which we ought to borrow at once); and then 
a fourth term of eight or ten weeks of work, which 
brings them up to the 12th of August, when the law is 
off on grouse, and courts and barristers, kings, lords, 
and commons disappear for the long vacation of 
twelve weeks. No wonder that they hold out better 
than ourselves, and that nervous breakdowns are 
rarely heard of over there ! But with us it is, in the 
case of busy barristers, a continuous and almost un- 
interrupted nervous strain for nine months of the 
year. 

It would be hardly worth while to recall even the 
names of the cases in which I was constantly engaged 
in the earlier half of my professional life. The 
foundations were being laid for the subsequent super- 
structure of professional success. I had a great liking 
for jury trials, and it always seemed to me that the 
lawyer who is constantly engaged in that branch of 
legal practice leads a more intensely intellectual life 
than almost any other professional man. 



IX 

MARRIAGE 

Having reached the point where I could not only- 
support myself, but a family, I naturally thought of 
getting married, but had never met my fate in this 
respect, or encountered a woman who answered all 
my ideas. But one day my friend John H. Sher- 
wood said to me: "I want to introduce you to a 
young lady who I am sure will exactly suit you, 
and, if I am not mistaken, you will suit her equally 
well." He must have been a wonderful judge of 
character to make so bold a prophecy, but he proved 
to be a real prophet. Not long afterwards, I think 
by his arrangement, I was invited to dine at the 
house of Mr. Thomas P. Rossiter, then a noted artist 
and very prominent in a social way among the artists 
of New York at that day, and there I met Miss Caro- 
line Dutcher Sterling, the daughter of Frederick A. 
Sterling, of Cleveland, Ohio, and I very soon found 
that it was as Mr. Sherwood had said. But there 
was a serious difficulty in the way. She was living 
at the house of her cousin, Mrs. Rossiter, and had 
come to New York for the purpose of studying art, 
intending to devote herself to it as a profession for 
life, with great prospect of success. She was some 
five years my junior, and was as earnestly devoted 

[ISO] 



[151] 

to art as I was to the law, so that we were both most 
unfortunately busy, and the worst of it was that she 
had made a vow of some sort never to think of any- 
thing but art. In fact, she wore a wedding-ring on 
which was inscribed the words *' Wedded to art," 
and the date, some time before I knew her. How- 
ever, I followed up our first acquaintance with great 
persistence, and found that the more I saw of her the 
better I liked her, and came to know that she had all 
the traits that I wanted, and that I must stake all 
my fortunes on that die. Still that plaguey wedding- 
ring stood in my way, but there is no rock so hard 
but that a little wave will beat admission in a thou- 
sand years, and after a while I found that she began 
to relent, and that my prospects were brightening 
every day, so I pressed on, and on the Fourth of 
July, 1 86 1, the beleaguered fortress yielded,* and I 

* The following self-explanatory verses, which were found among Mr. 
Choate's papers, are interesting, as they were written on the Fourth of July, 
1861, to Mrs. John Jay, at Katonah, in Westchester County. The manuscript 
of the verses (a portion of which is reproduced in facsimile on a neighboring 
page) was discovered by Mrs. Jay among her papers and returned to the 
writer. 

"My dear Mrs. Jay — 

Words are weak to convey 
The chagrin and dismay 
Which it costs me to say, 
I must still disobey 
You: nor come, on the Fourth, to Katonah. 

But that day of parade 
I have vowed to a maid 
Of whose wrath I'm afraid 
Lest my word, once betrayed. 
She may leave me for life to bemoan her. 

She is youthful and fair. 
With the saintliest air. 



[•52] 

celebrated that anniversary of our national inde- 
pendence by sacrificing my own independence for 
life. The old wedding-ring was put aside, and on 
the i6th of October, in that year, I put another ring 
upon her finger, which continues there to this day. 

Upon the whole, it was the most fortunate day of 
my life, for although fifty-five years and more have 
fled, I think that neither of us have ever had occasion 
to regret it. In all that time we have had some very 

And her sunny brown hair 
Decked with lilies so rare 
Descends on the rarest of shoulders. 

And hard were the case, 
But the wonderful grace 
That's enthroned in her face 
Would win her a place 
In the hearts of the coldest beholders. 

And then, such a mind ! 
Why, I may be stone blind 
But if you can find 
One as pure and refined 
And as rightly inclined 
You must let it appear in the sequel. 

And then, as for her soul. 
While our planet shall roll 
You may ransack the whole. 
From Equator to Pole 
But will never discover her equal. 

She's so free from all taint 
That men call her a saint, 
And she may or she mayn't 
Lend an ear to my plaint, 
But my heart is not faint 
And my lips with all praises have blest her. 

Now I trust you'll excuse 
This poor plea of my muse, 
Since I cannot but choose 
For this cause, to refuse 
What it grieves me to lose — 
A kind welcome once more to Westchester." 



FACSIMILE OF MANUSCRIPT OF VERSES. 

Written to Mrs. John Jay by Mr. Choate on the day of his engagement— July 4, 
1861. The verses — printed, in ioto, on pages 151 and 152 — are interesting as 
showing his characteristic handwriting, which never faltered until the day of 

his death. 



the i6th of Ortober, in that year. T put another 

Upon the wh' tie mo late d.i 

my ir 

fled, 1 .,;.w...v MA.-t ..v,i:. , . v.: M 

to ree'Tt it, In nil thnt rinic ^ 



.2ad;i3V TO TqW38UMAM TO 3JIMI2DAI 



.ilasb aid 







/l^ ^ ^ ji^ -^ ^^^-^ 



2^cC& t^^^^z^^ <z.^c ^C^ ^ 



JA 



[•53] 

severe trj^ls and afflictions, but for all that have had 
abundant and ever-increasing cause to be thankful. 
She is fully entitled to the better half of all our pros- 
perity and success, and now, as the end of life ap- 
proaches, we do, indeed, find ourselves blessed with 
all that should accompany old age, as honor, love, 
obedience, troops of friends. 

For the first year of our married life we went to 
board with her aunt, Mrs. Carr, in a pleasant little 
house on Twenty-third Street, just east of Fourth 
Avenue. It was destroyed a few years ago, but the 
marks of it still remain on the side of the adjoining 
mansion of much greater pretensions against which 
it rested. In the spring of 1863 we ventured to go to 
housekeeping, and hired for six hundred dollars a 
year a modest house in West Twenty-first Street, No. 
93, afterwards changed to No. 137, which we occu- 
pied for six or seven years until it would hold no 
more children than four, with whom we had already 
been blessed. 

When we look around us in these days and see how 
children of our acquaintance are in the habit of com- 
mencing married life on the scale which their parents 
have already attained, we sometimes wonder how 
we ever had the courage to embark in it, but those 
were very simple days, and we were able by dint of 
a reasonable frugality to lay aside from year to year 
about half our income, which, being steadily contin- 
ued, soon removed all danger of the wolf coming to 
our door. 



